Dot Hill Systems Corp., a world-class provider of entry-level and midrange storage solutions for OEMs and system integrators (SIs), today announced general availability of the Dot Hill 2522, the industry's first two-rack-unit (2U), 24-drive high-performance, high-density, external RAID storage system that leverages small form factor (2.5-inch) hard disk drives with SAS host connectivity.

These high performance direct attached storage systems, which support SAS, SATA and solid state disks (SSD), are ideal for OEMs and storage integrators implementing blade server systems in IT or telco environments where high-speed and high-density, local storage is required. With a host interface speed of 12Gbps and short chassis depth, the new Dot Hill 2522 SAS disk arrays are a natural upgrade for older parallel SCSI deployments and are ideal for high density video streaming applications such as video-on-demand as well as high definition imaging, video non-linear editing and post production.

"The Dot Hill 2522 combines the benefits of 2.5-inch drives and Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) host computer connectivity to deliver a powerful solution that can meet the needs of a wide variety of customer applications," said Andy Mills, vice president of marketing and business development, Dot Hill Systems. "Users can now take advantage of the increasing number of external SAS host connections being integrated into next-generation servers and workstations to provide a highly effective storage expansion solution."

"The 2522 is the latest example of Dot Hill's time-to-market leadership in storage innovation," Mills continued. "Within two years we expect more than half of RAID drives to be 2.5-inch, given that servers have already begun to make the transition. By being first to market earlier this year with the first 2U Fibre Channel -- and now the first SAS -- RAID-based storage systems using this game-changing form factor, we continue to provide our customers with greater host I/O and disk form-factor choices."