Dot Hill (Nasdaq: HILL), a market leader in providing flexible storage offerings and responsive service and support to OEMs and system integrators, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted the company U.S. patent 6,990,611, entitled "Recovering Data from Arrays of Storage Devices after Certain Failures," also known as Trust Array(TM). Dot Hill designed Trust Array to allow customers to easily and affordably recover lost data in large storage systems when conventional drive array recovery methods fail.
Trust Array allows system administrators to access data when a transient (or temporary) failure occurs, putting an array into an offline (or unusable) state. The feature empowers users to bring offline arrays to an online (or usable) state, without requiring costly reconfiguration or power cycles. Trust Array can be found in the Dot Hill RIO Xtreme(TM) and RIVA(TM) FC RAID products and in new products that Dot Hill will announce this year.
"Dot Hill's Trust Array feature helped us quickly get our customer's system back online without extra fees or training sessions," said Paul Poynter, director of applications engineering and product development at Rorke Data. "This enabled us to positively impact our customer's return on investment and total cost of ownership. Overall, the Trust Array feature is a simple and efficient tool, and just one of the many reasons why we chose Dot Hill as a partner."
Dot Hill's engineering team at the Longmont, Colo. technology center developed Trust Array along with current controller technology for the company's products. Patents issued recently include "The Initialization of a Storage System" and another entitled "Bus Zoning in a Channel Independent Storage Controller Architecture". "The Initialization of a Storage System" patent covers an invention for fast initialization of redundant array of independent disks (RAID) systems, and the "Bus Zoning in a Channel Independent Storage Controller Architecture" patent encompasses inventions derived from Dot Hill's proprietary RAID controller technology and enable high-speed, reliable access to business-critical applications.
"The Trust Array feature is just one of many Dot Hill intellectual property assets that indicate our leadership position in creating new, streamlined processes for maintaining storage systems," said Dana Kammersgard, president of Dot Hill. "We expect to see more patents in the future from our talented group of engineers. Our customers are our top priority, and this Trust Array feature provides an affordable, reliable option for recovering data safely for those using our RIO Xtreme and RIVA FC RAID products, as well as future Dot Hill storage solutions."
About RIO Xtreme
The RIO Xtreme is a quick, scalable and manageable storage server system that assures on-time and on-cost project delivery whether it's for editing video, manipulating geophysical data, visual simulation or delivering high-bandwidth programming.
About RIVA FC
RIVA FC provides a high-performance solution for high bandwidth applications including medical imaging, video streaming and geophysical data collection. With 730 megabyte (MB) per second cache reads and 551MB per second sequential RAID-5 writes to disk, RIVA delivers data faster than any product in its class.
About Dot Hill
Dot Hill is the market leader in providing flexible storage offerings and responsive service and support to OEMs and system integrators, from engagement through end of life. Founded in 1984, Dot Hill has more than two decades of expertise in developing high-quality, competitively priced storage products. Focused on delivering global 24 X 7 X 365 technical support, the company has more than 100,000 systems in use worldwide and numerous OEM and indirect partners. With its patented technology and award-winning SANnet II(R) and RIO Xtreme(TM) families of storage and its Dot Hill Storage Services, Dot Hill makes storage easy. Headquartered in Carlsbad, Calif., Dot Hill has offices in China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States. More information is available at http://www.dothill.com.
Certain statements contained in this press release regarding matters that are not historical fact are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Because such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such statements include the future growth, revenue and financial results of Dot Hill, the dates of availability, continued availability and performance of current or future Dot Hill products, any positive effect on Dot Hill's financial results or otherwise due to the issuance of any Dot Hill patent, and Dot Hill's ability to continue to receive patent protection on current or future patents. The risks that contribute to the uncertain nature of the forward-looking statements include: any unforeseen technological, intellectual property, supply or engineering issues and changing customer preferences. However, there are many other risks not listed here that may affect the future business of Dot Hill, as well as the forward-looking statements contained herein. To learn about such risks and uncertainties, you should read the risk factors set forth in Dot Hill's public filings with the SEC, including the Forms 8-K, 10-K and 10-Q most recently filed by Dot Hill. All forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date on which they were made. Dot Hill undertakes no obligation to update such statements to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.