Dot Hill Systems has announced the latest addition to its increasing patent portfolio -- an innovation that optimizes iSCSI storage area network (SAN) performance and reduces expansion costs.

Using the flow control mechanisms built into iSCSI SANs, the technology in Dot Hill's 86th U.S. patent, numbered 8,244,939, supports increased capacity for maximized performance of storage controllers and networks. It achieves this by allowing storage controller ports to handle more read and write requests from the server. If one port is maxed out due to a full queue of read and write requests, the Dot Hill software innovation makes it possible to borrow queue depth from another less busy port, reducing the number of "retries" by hosts, and more efficiently relaying requests to the storage controller.

"iSCSI-based SANs continue to grow in popularity due to their affordability and ease-of-use," said Jim Kuenzel, senior vice president of engineering, Dot Hill Systems. "Administrators are looking for ways to make the absolute most of their iSCSI investments, maximizing performance while reducing costs and the need to make additional investments."

"This latest patent describes innovations that do exactly that," Kuenzel explains, "On today's iSCSI SANs, each controller port is programmed to accept a limited number of read and write requests, even though many times, even with multiple port storage arrays, the controller has the capability to handle more requests than a given host port normally is able to handle. This patented technology resolves the situation to maximize performance, reduce costs and increase efficiencies."

Dot Hill's newest patent describes technology that is integrated in the company's AssuredSAN 3000 and 3003 Series, the new AssuredSAN 4000 Series and the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series. The Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage portfolio offers up to 288 terabytes of capacity in a single system, great ease-of-use and up to 99.999 percent reliability.

AssuredSAN 5000 Pro Series: Seriously Smart, Real-Time Tiered Storage for the Midrange

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series with RealStor software takes tiered storage to a new level — beyond competitors' automated batch migration, and into a new era of autonomic, real-time data tiering. With RealStor, businesses gain the advantage of very high performance SSDs, using them to their maximum benefit, while storing less frequently accessed data on slower, but much less expensive, hard disk drives. Designed for the midrange market, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series is a high-performance, highly available, fully integrated storage solution that delivers consistently faster access to current data with built-in, real-time, autonomic tiered storage and virtualization.

Highly Reliable AssuredSAN 4000 Series Storage Solution Delivers Wicked Fast Performance

Sharing the same powerful architecture as Dot Hill's AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series midrange system, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series provides superior streaming performance for bandwidth-intensive applications. The AssuredSAN 4000 Series sets a new Dot Hill performance standard -- delivering up to 5200 MB/s of sustained sequential read throughput and up to 3000 MB/s of sustained sequential write performance -- making it ideal for customers in the SuperComputing marketplace.

AssuredSAN 3000 and 3003 Series Deliver High Performance for Small and Medium Business

The AssuredSAN 3000 and 3003 Series feature the latest storage networking technologies such as 8Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb iSCSI which opens the door to Fibre Channel levels of SAN performance for small- to medium-sized businesses based on standard Ethernet networking technology. AssuredSAN 3000 and 3003 Series arrays are available with Dot Hill AssuredRemote data management software for remote replication, AssuredCopy, Dot Hill's volume copy technology, and AssuredSnap snapshot capability for improved data availability and business continuity.