Dot Hill and Supermicro Partner 

Dot Hill Systems Corp. has entered into an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement with Supermicro to incorporate its Virtual RAID Adapter (AssuredVRA) software into Supermicro AMD-based server solutions. This integrated solution is available immediately to Supermicro customers worldwide.

Dot Hill AssuredVRA replaces traditional RAID-on-motherboard (ROMB) offerings with a proven, robust data protection solution for internal storage that rivals more expensive add-in card-based RAID controllers. Eliminating the need for such controllers along with the associated power, cooling and support costs, Dot Hill Virtual RAID Adapter software enables businesses to lower storage costs while providing data protection and management for compute-intensive applications.

"Supermicro has become a market leader by delivering first-to-market advantages, optimized technologies and a range of high performance server solutions that lower customers' total cost of investment," said Garret Wein, vice president of worldwide OEM sales, Dot Hill Systems. "With a worldwide reach and a presence in many of our key vertical markets such as big data, HPC, oil & gas, and media & entertainment, Supermicro is a highly synergistic go-to-market partner for our AssuredVRA technology. We continue to see demand from OEM customers for this innovative technology, which allows manufacturers to support high-performance RAID protection for disk drives inside their AMD-based computing solutions."

Dot Hill AssuredVRA technology enables client, server, storage and motherboard vendors to integrate RAID technology into their products by leveraging the power of today's multi-core CPUs instead of a dedicated and ROC-based RAID add-in board, helping to reduce hardware, power, cooling and support costs. Basic AssuredVRA and enhanced AssuredVRA products directly support the built-in core logic SATA ports that come as part of these systems, enabling vendors to easily add RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 capability to these otherwise unused, built-in SATA controllers, without the need for a more expensive ROC based solution.

Dot Hill AssuredVRA technology leverages a sophisticated RAID software stack, enabling today's computer systems with both hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) support to effectively process RAID tasks without compromising performance needed for other operations. AssuredVRA's innovative write-caching engine provides high performance that often exceeds that of competing host software RAID stacks or ROC-based adapter cards. Because Virtual RAID Adapters are software-based, they can easily incorporate other data protection services, such as n-way mirroring schemes, to support simple, transparent and cost-effective system backup and recovery.

Dot Hill AssuredVRA technology's key features include:

• Single, unified O/S driver and single-pane web-based management suite capable of managing RAID sets on both core logic SATA and SAS/SATA I/O controllers
• Performance enhancements for SSD drives, including TRIM support which internally wipes unused blocks of data
• Native support for multiple motherboard vendors that use the AMD SP5100 and other supported AMD chipsets
• Broad Operating system support -- Windows 7, 8, 8.1, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012 R2, RHEL 6.X, SLES 11; Ubuntu Client, Win PE
• 4K native drive support and Serial General Purpose Input/Output (SGPIO) LED support
• Support for basic RAID 0, 1, 10 features or higher featured RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 schemes
• Hidden arrays and split mirror
• Support for mixed capacity drives allowing 100 percent usage of all disk capacity available
• Logical Array Secure Erase
• RAIDAble support allows RAIDAble arrays to be transformed to R0 or R1 with new drive auto detection