ACADEMIA

Dot Hill Solution Provides Reliable Foundation for Fast Linux and KVM Development

Linux distributor SUSE has selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series as the storage foundation for the development of its SUSE Linux Enterprise product family.

Headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany, SUSE is a leading provider of enterprise Linux solutions that help companies increase agility, reduce cost and manage complexity. With a portfolio centered on SUSE Linux Enterprise, an interoperable platform for mission-critical computing, SUSE enables organizations to confidently deliver computing services across physical, virtual and cloud environments. With a constant demand for fast and reliable storage, the core development teams at SUSE were in need of a new storage infrastructure to accommodate over 80TB of data to host their core Linux and KVM-based internal development environment including all build and repository servers.

SUSE worked closely with Stuttgart-based international IT distributor, STORDIS GmbH, which specializes in high performance computing solutions. STORDIS introduced the Dot Hill AssuredSAN range of RAID arrays as an ideal storage solution that would address SUSE's need for reliability, performance and ease-of-use.

SUSE selected Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3730 networked Fibre Channel RAID arrays for the roll-out of their new storage infrastructure with an initial 80TB of capacity. During the first days of the initial test phase SUSE noted significant storage performance improvements compared with the RAID storage systems the company had used before. AssuredSAN also presented a simple and intuitive web-based management interface which, unlike many competitive offerings, required no host based agents and offered straightforward wizard based setup. The SUSE team was also particularly impressed by the number of volumes and LUNs supported by a single system as well as Dot Hill's patented EcoStor battery-free cache protection mechanism.

The storage platform supports several core development infrastructures including SUSE Linux Enterprise build servers, repository servers and also the archive of all SUSE builds. SUSE plans to capitalize on the simple license-free expansion capabilities of Dot Hill arrays as their data storage needs grow and are looking to implement the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 series platforms throughout their many data centers across the globe.

"We saw an immediate performance increase during our evaluation of the Dot Hill 3730 systems. The caching algorithms are very efficient and the battery-free cache backup design eliminates the write-through performance issues we were seeing with other systems," explained Rudiger Oertel, software development and IT administration manager at SUSE. "Reliability is also vital. Many staff work flexible hours and the support staff must be online at all times to look after our customers. Thanks to the improved system availability, we are able to increase the workforce productivity and concentrate on our core development business to improve our offerings and service."