Dot Hill Improves Data Reliability and Increases Storage Efficiency With Latest Round of Patents

LONGMONT, Colo., Sept. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq: HILL), a provider of world-class storage solutions and software for OEMs, open storage partners and system integrators, today announced the addition of four new patents to the company's technology portfolio, upping the company's intellectual property total to 71 patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

"These four patents serve as validation of Dot Hill's technical expertise and our ability to produce highly relevant technology solutions to real-world business problems," said Jim Kuenzel, senior vice president of engineering at Dot Hill Systems. "Our customers should not have to worry about their data. This is why our engineering team is on a perpetual quest to improve data reliability and solve the operational efficiency challenges storage administrators face on a daily basis."

Dot Hill's newest innovations address the need for high data reliability and efficiencies in storage operations. The first of the four patents describes inventions to improve how data in a RAID system is rebuilt when a corruption error occurs. While RAID systems from other vendors replace bad blocks using data from the same, failing drive, U.S. patent 7,774,643, "Method and apparatus for preventing permanent data loss due to single failure of a fault-tolerant array," describes a more reliable approach. This technology ensures that other sources, never the corrupted drive, are used to rebuild the blocks. This method is not only more reliable, but also improves performance because only the bad block is reconstructed, as opposed to the entire stripe containing the bad block, as in most other RAID methods.

The second patent describes innovations to increase the reliability of Dot Hill's storage systems, and is implemented in the 2000 Series and 3000 Series systems. U.S. patent 7,788,541, "Apparatus and method for identifying disk drives with unreported data corruption," describes technology that allows the RAID controller to identify certain kinds of disk drive problems that are not reported as failures by disk drives. This innovation addresses a potential risk of traditional RAID storage. In some instances, unreliable data goes undetected and is read from storage devices, resulting in application failures, wrong data or incorrect status presented to servers and clients. This innovation provides users with more granular detection means, resulting in higher data reliability.

The inventions in the third and fourth patents both offer storage administration efficiencies and improved system responsiveness. Patent 7,783,603, "Backing store reinitialization method and apparatus," describes an improvement to Dot Hill's AssuredCopy™ volume copy software and is implemented on Dot Hill 2000 and 3000 Series storage arrays. It allows system administrators to reinitialize a storage volume in one step after a snapshot deletion command is issued to the controller when all snapshots are already either being deleted or marked for deletion. While this was previously a serial operation where one snapshot was deleted at a time, the patented new method saves time and quickly readies the system for new snapshots.

The company's fourth patent describes a method that makes it possible to write to the Master Volume (storage file system) even when the Master Volume is being copied on Dot Hill 2000 Series and 3000 Series arrays. Previous to this innovation, a system administrator might copy the Master Volume for security or reliability reasons and find that the file system would be unavailable. Updates to the Master Volume would be put on hold until the copy was completed, to ensure the integrity of the copy. This would essentially make the storage unavailable until the operation was complete. The innovation described in U.S. patent 7,783,850, "Method and apparatus for Master Volume access during volume copy," ensures the storage is fully available, and the Master Volume can be updated simultaneously during the copy process.

About Dot Hill

Offering enterprise-class security, availability and data protection, Dot Hill provides responsive and adaptive storage solutions to meet 24/7/365 business demands. With Dot Hill, businesses can proactively safeguard and manage business data, and leverage operational efficiencies to save time, effort and expense today, while meeting the evolving business needs of tomorrow strategically and cost effectively. Headquartered in Longmont, Colo., Dot Hill has offices and/or representatives in China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Singapore, United Kingdom, and the United States.

For more information, visit us at www.dothill.com.

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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 statements. Forward-looking statements include the availability and performance of current or future Dot Hill products based on the patented technology described in this press release, any competitive advantage that the patents provide to Dot Hill, any positive effect on Dot Hill's financial results due to the issuance of any Dot Hill patent, and Dot Hill's ability to continue to receive patent protection on current or future technology. 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 the date on which they were made. Dot Hill undertakes no obligation to update such statements to reflect later events or circumstances

SOURCE Dot Hill Systems Corp.