CASPUR Benchmarks Dot Hill's Fibre Channel SANnet; Italian Research Consortium's Tests Confirm SANnet's Interoperability.

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

CARLSBAD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 21, 2001

Dot Hill Systems Corp. (NYSE:HIL), a leading supplier of carrier-class data storage and storage area network (SAN) solutions, today announced the results of benchmark testing of its SANnet(TM) 7100 Fibre Channel storage system. CASPUR, southern Italy's premier non-profit scientific research consortium, benchmarked the SANnet 7110, which confirmed SANnet to be a viable building block for distributed storage solutions in the IBM SP3 environment.

Over the past few years, CASPUR has built a heterogeneous SAN that began with Dot Hill's legacy LynxArray II and currently includes SANnet 4200 and 7100 systems along with Brocade switches. A variety of operating systems including Solaris, AIX, Linux and Windows are running on the servers connected to the SAN along with Fibre Channel tape libraries for backup. Because CASPUR is an inter-university research consortium, interoperability and open standards are a must.

With the proven performance and interoperability of the existing SANnet-based SAN, CASPUR's lead systems engineer, Andrei Maslennikov, decided to investigate the possibility of configuring a fast, high capacity, redundant storage solution on CASPUR's IBM SP3 four-node frame. Maslennikov said, "The obvious choice for this architecture was the IBM serial disk system, but because Dot Hill's SANnet has performed so well I wanted to run a benchmark performance test. The test proved that SANnet is fully compatible with the IBM SP3 and performs as well as the SSA (serial storage architecture) disks in this environment. Furthermore, the total cost of ownership is lower because of SANnet's open systems architecture versus the proprietary SSA disks."

The benchmark test was conducted with four SANnet 7110 RAID (redundant array of independent disks) systems and large (1 to 32 gigabyte) files in a buffered and unbuffered write speed test. SANnet's performance corresponded very well to measurements recorded by Lawrence Livermore Labs with SSA disks.

Dot Hill is a leading independent provider of carrier-class data storage solutions and services. With solutions that include storage area networks, NEBS-certified systems for Telco and Internet operations and world-class service capabilities, Dot Hill believes it is uniquely positioned to address the storage requirements of mission-critical continuous computing environments. Dot Hill's customers include many of the world's leading Internet service providers, advanced technology and telecommunications companies, and government agencies. Dot Hill is an ISO 9002 certified company, and its Web site is www.dothill.com.

Dot Hill and SANnet are trademarks of Dot Hill Systems Corp. All other trademarks and names are the property of their respective owners.

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 availability of SANnet as well as its performance in environments not yet tested. The risks that contribute to the uncertain nature of the forward-looking statements include: unforeseen technological, intellectual property 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 the forms 10K and 10Q 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.