High-performance storage system eliminates system bottleneck, cuts response time by seventy percent
22nd February 2000 — In a move highlighting the value provided to its storage business by indirect sales partners, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), today announced that one of its value-added resellers, MacroStor, has extended the connectivity of the Hitachi Freedom Storage™ 5800 by qualifying it for use on the Unisys ClearPath™ NX mainframe processor. To date, MacroStor, a leading value-added reseller of alternative storage solutions to Unisys customers, is the only vendor — including Hitachi Data Systems itself — that offers the 5800 for use with the Unisys platform.
As a result of cooperation between MacroStor and Hitachi Data Systems, the Freedom Storage 5800 — the world's fastest midrange storage subsystem — is being operated as part of an upgraded mainframe system at Seminole Community College in central Florida. The system upgrade gives Seminole the shot of rocket power it needed to establish an online registration system for its nearly 30,000-member student body, as well as the capability to support a host of other administrative and developmental applications.
Seminole, which positions itself as the premier technology training institute for its region, is the first community college in the state of Florida to take the step of enabling students to register for classes via the World Wide Web from PCs at home or on campus.
"We were a bit apprehensive about putting this Web application on the system because it would be one more thing pounding our input-output capability," said Paul Bachand, Seminole's mainframe systems administrator. "The processor and disks we had before just couldn't handle the load. With the 5800 and the new processor, we're now handling two to three times as many IOs per hour. There is no longer an IO bottleneck in the system and response time for the students has been reduced from an average of about ten seconds to about two to three seconds. This additional IO capability is easily enough to support the online registration application, as well as everything else we have running on the system."
The school had been hoping for a rate of about fifteen-percent registration via the Web in the initial stages of implementing the application. But four months after installing the system, it was already seeing almost twice that rate of online registration. The current goal is to get up to 90 percent of the students registering online within a year.
Seminole's student record data, which is used in the online registration application, is only one part of the information being housed in the Freedom Storage 5800. The subsystem also supports the school's payroll and accounts payable systems, as well as the general ledger system. Moreover, the 5800 holds duplicates of each of these four production databases for use in development and testing applications, further exploiting the system in a way that was not possible before.
The Freedom Storage 5800 subsystem was installed at Seminole in March 1999 with a usable capacity of 144 gigabytes (GB), spread across eleven 18-GB disk drives. Seminole operates the storage in RAID5 mode to protect against data loss in the unlikely event of disk drive failure.
Seminole's data center operations are based on a Unisys ClearPathä NX processor running the MCP/AS 4.5.1 mainframe operating system. The suitability of the 5800 as part of an integrated solution for use in this environment was brought to the attention of Seminole by representatives of MacroStor.
"We were able to show Seminole how they could use the 5800 to get more work out of their system," said Craig Harries, Vice President of Storage Products for MacroStor. "And when they found out that a 5800 feature called dynamic multi-port load balancing can support data concurrently on two SCSI paths — that also made a big impression on them."
"The Freedom Storage 5800 is designed to provide robust performance in a wide variety of open-systems environments," said Richard Search, Vice President of Storage Product Management and Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. "The successful installation at Seminole Community College provides strong support for this message. Furthermore, it clearly shows the value added by our indirect sales partners. MacroStor is the only vendor so far to qualify the 5800 on a Unisys platform, extending support for the 5800 to a broader range of customers than we've previously served."
MacroStor provides all first-call support services to Seminole Community College and is responsible for resolving any potential problems related to the connectivity of the storage subsystem with the host processor. Hitachi Data Systems has committed to resolving problems associated with the subsystem itself.
Seminole Community College (SCC), located in Sanford, Florida, is a comprehensive, learning-centered institution serving 30,000 day, evening, weekend, and distance learning students each year. As the most comprehensive community college in the state, SCC provides instruction for individuals pursuing the Associate in Arts Degree, Associate in Science Degree, high tech career certification, continuing professional education and recertification, update training for professionals seeking advancement or adult basic literacy. To learn more about Seminole Community College and its award-winning programs, nationally-recognized faculty, or competitive sports programs, visit on the Internet at http://www.seminolestate.edu/
MacroStor has provided a broad range of storage solutions to users worldwide since 1981. Specializing in Unisys mainframe and NT storage solutions, MacroStor is the leading alternative vendor of RAID storage to the Unisys user community and markets Hitachi Data Systems solutions as part of the award winning SER Macrosoft Document Management solution suite. Headquartered in Rochester Hills, Michigan, the company has five sales and support offices across the U.S. as well as in Mexico City and London. In addition to a direct sales force, business partners in Canada, Mexico, South and Central America, and the Far East actively market the company's solutions.
Recognized as a leading provider of business solutions for the world's most IT-intensive corporations, Hitachi Data Systems offers technical services, multi-platform storage subsystems, and the industry's broadest line of high-performance servers. The company's solutions are "Built for Fast Times™," enabling customers to exploit the value of information technology for success in the Internet economy. These solutions reflect Hitachi's vision of allowing clients to focus on their business, and not their technology. Hitachi Data Systems is owned by Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) and has its headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
Hitachi, Ltd. headquartered in Tokyo, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1998 (ended March 31, 1999) consolidated sales of 7,977 billion yen ($65.9 billion). The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment.
Contacts: PR
¹ At an exchange rate of 124 yen to the dollar.
Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. Built for Fast Times is a trademark of Hitachi America, Ltd. VisionDesk and VisionBase are trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems. Pentium is a trademark of Intel Corporation.
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