New Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 Is Foundation for Solutions to Simplify and Improve Service Levels, and Accelerate Deployment of Information-Based Strategic Business Initiatives
26 June 2000 SANTA CLARA, California — Exploiting the revolutionary architecture of the new Freedom Storageä Lightning 9900ä, Hitachi Data Systems today announced a set of solutions that will strengthen the information infrastructure of businesses participating in the New Economy. The Lightning 9900, the first in a new generation of storage systems based on an internal switched fabric architecture, provides a highly scalable, highly resilient, very-high-performance framework for solutions that will reduce IT complexity, improve IT service levels, and accelerate the deployment of information-based strategic business initiatives.
"The new Lightning 9900-based solutions include:
Hitachi Storage Maximizer for automating storage performance requirements
Rapid Recovery for Open Systems, integrating NanoCopyä capability into Hitachi Asynchronous Remote Copy(HARC) for ultra-fast recovery of enterprise data
Hitachi InstantSplit for application testing and data mining operations
Open SAN for Freedom Networksä with user's-choice "best-of-breed" components
Non-disruptive backup-to-tape solution for multi-terabyte Oracle databases
"In the New Economy, where competition is a mere mouse-click away, businesses have to provide instant access to information around the clock, for both internal and external customers, get to market faster with new products and services, and increase efficiencies to reduce costs," said Marlene Woodworth, Hitachi Data Systems Vice President of Product Management and Marketing for Enterprise Products. "Our Freedom Storage Lightning 9900, with its bottleneck-free scalability, provides a platform for massive storage consolidation. This is the starting point for a whole new level of solutions that will power the New Economy's information infrastructure, finally delivering on the promise of the information utility."
In the New Economy, data explosion has taken on a whole new meaning. The Lightning 9900's unparalleled capacity and ability to scale without experiencing the performance bottlenecks of traditional shared-bus storage enables massive consolidation of storage to take place. As a result, customers will have fewer storage systems to manage and will be able to standardize on consistent practices using one well-understood interface. To further ease storage management, Hitachi Data Systems provides software solutions that automate previously tedious and error-prone functions.
For example, Storage Maximizer combines Hitachi Dynamic Optimizer and FlashAccess Manager software with the Lightning 9900, allowing customers to hold in check the cost of managing storage, even as they aggressively consolidate their data onto fewer subsystems. Storage administrators can "fill it up and max it out," confident that they can meet performance requirements all the way to 37TB. Dynamic Optimizer then takes over, eliminating "hot spots," and automating performance at pre-set levels, while FlashAccess locks files into cache, guaranteeing data access at memory, not disk, speed.
With the massive consolidation made possible by Lightning 9900 and Storage Maximizer capabilities, customers will be able to lower not only the original purchase costs, but also get additional savings from lower storage management costs, lower software and maintenance costs, and reduced real estate and environmental costs. If this combination reduces per-megabyte administration costs by 40 percent, for example, users will gain a return on investment of well over 3000 percent — and ROI goes up dramatically as more and more capacity is managed by the Lightning 9900.
In the New Economy, performance and availability go hand in hand. If a Web site is slow in delivering requested information, it might as well be offline. Of course, if a Web site is down for any length of time, the business may not be around for long. Building on Hitachi Data Systems' reputation for "bulletproof" reliability, the Lightning 9900 offers complete redundancy and hot-replaceable components, delivering maximum uptime.
To this already robust platform, Hitachi Data Systems adds a number of solutions to ensure quick recovery from acts of nature, human errors, and malicious attacks. In the world of e-commerce, it is no longer enough to have a backup copy of one's data; businesses must also plan for rapid recovery from such outages. Hitachi Data Systems is the only storage vendor that is providing non-disruptive copy solutions that assure fast recovery and full data integrity.
Hitachi Rapid Recovery for Open Systems and the Lightning 9900 bring to the vast number of UNIX™ and Windows NT™/2000™ users a business continuity solution that has already changed the face of disaster recovery in the S/390™ world. The rapid recovery solution introduced in mid-1999 for S/390-attached storage combines Hitachi NanoCopy, Hitachi Asynchronous Remote Copy (HARC), and Hitachi ShadowImage, enabling data to be copied from one set of S/390-attached subsystems to another with complete integrity and without disrupting user applications in any way. As a result, these point-in-time copies can be made very frequently, reducing recovery time from hours to minutes.
With the Lightning 9900, very large databases and other applications no longer have to be spread across multiple storage subsystems in order to maintain high performance. Customers in the open-systems world can now consolidate their databases and use the Lightning 9900 with NanoCopy capability to recover their critical data very quickly following an outage. As a result, the nightmare of lost revenue, lost data, and lost business can be eliminated for many previously vulnerable members of the e-commerce community.
Hitachi Data Systems said it plans to provide services and solutions to assist in the automation of data recovery solutions.
Accelerate Deployment of Strategic Business Initiatives; Lightning 9900 Optimized for OpenSAN Strategy In the New Economy, getting to market first is often the difference between success and failure. Hence, the absolute necessity for a robust information infrastructure on which new applications and new technologies can be deployed quickly.
Hitachi InstantSplit, an enhancement to ShadowImage, provides instant access to data against which new applications can be tested or data mining queries can be run. With InstantSplit and the Lightning 9900's bottleneck-free performance, applications can be deployed faster, resulting in the faster delivery of products to market and better-targeted sales campaigns.
The Lightning 9900's Hi-Starä architecture, which is optimized for SANs, combined with Hitachi Data Systems' OpenSAN product strategy, provides an unbeatable combination for future-proofing the New Economy's information infrastructure. OpenSAN gives customers the ability to choose "best-of-breed" components to build Freedom Data Networks™. Hitachi Data Systems also provides an extensive portfolio of services, from infrastructure assessment to full deployment to help customers gain all of the storage pooling and centralized management benefits of our OpenSAN strategy.
Another Lightning 9900-enabled solution is the world's only high-speed, non-disruptive backup-to-tape solution for users of never-go-down, mission-critical, multi-terabyte Oracle™ databases on open-systems platforms. This new capability in data warehousing, which solves one of the most daunting problems facing IT managers today, comes from an effort to tightly integrate Hitachi ShadowImage software with Oracle's Database Management System. ShadowImage can provide up to nine copies of a database volume so that the same volume can be used simultaneously for testing, development, data-mining queries, and off-site replication, as well as backup, substantially increasing the value of the solution.
Committed to helping customers exploit the value of information technology for success in the Internet economy, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), is a leading provider of business solutions for the world's most information-intensive corporations. For further information on Hitachi Data Systems, access www.hds.com.
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. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd., please visit Hitachi's Web site at http://www.hitachi.co.jp.
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. Freedom Storage, Lightning 9900, NanoCopy, and Hi-Star are trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. OS/390, ESCON, Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex, and GDPS are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. Windows NT and Windows 2000 are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company, Limited. Novell and NetWare are registered trademarks of Novell, Incorporated.
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