Company Delivers Unmatched Performance and Massive
Scalability with Thunder 9200™ — the Latest Member of
the Freedom Storage™ 9000 All-Fibre Family
SANTA CLARA, California, 23 January, 2001 — Broadening its offerings of the world's most scalable, highest-performing storage systems, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today announced the Hitachi Freedom Storage™ Thunder 9200™, the latest member of the Freedom Storage 9000 all-fibre family. The Thunder 9200 delivers massive scalability and unparalleled performance previously available only to enterprise customers. This new offering complements the Lightning 9900™ models announced in June and November of last year.
Designed to meet the storage needs of companies operating heterogeneous computing environments, the Thunder 9200 supports virtually all high-end storage-management features that have become standard for users of the most powerful, centrally managed, enterprise-class storage systems. The Thunder 9200 supports these features in a very compact footprint that meets open- systems distributed and centralized computing requirements. These features include ShadowImage™ 9200, remote copy, logical unit security for Storage Area Networks (SANs), dynamic logical unit management, binding of selected user data in cache memory, near-perfect reliability with redundant, hot-swappable components, multiple RAID-level support, and 2Gb/sec-ready host interfaces. Together they give mid-range users unparalleled flexibility in protecting their data and tuning the performance of their applications.
"With the introduction of the Thunder 9200, we are now able to offer best-of-breed storage solutions for companies covering the entire spectrum of open-system computing environments," said Dave Roberson, COO, Hitachi Data Systems. "Our corporate strategy is now focused completely on storage, making us more determined than ever before to leverage our technical expertise to deliver solutions and storage platforms that will help a wider range of customers manage their exploding volumes of data."
Designed with a high-performance, all-fibre architecture that delivers a system bandwidth two to four times wider than competitive offerings, the Thunder 9200 allows users to accommodate substantial increases in workload. The Thunder 9200 scales in a single configuration from 72 gigabytes (GB) to 7.2 terabytes (TB) of capacity, packaged in flexible rackmount or deskside configurations to support easy upgrades as capacity needs expand.
The combination of high scalability, high performance, and advanced Java-based GUI management capabilities, all at an affordable price, makes the Thunder 9200 ideal for such applications as E-commerce, data mart/data mining, messaging, and Web servers, as well as storage consolidation for Network Attached Storage (NAS) and SANs in Windows NT/2000(r) and UNIX(r) environments.
Aggressive Scalability of Storage Capacity — Allows user to easily grow capacity to 7.2TB and add connections without disruption in order to manage exponential data growth and unpredictable seasonal spikes.
Rapid Information Delivery — All-fibre architecture combined with dual-ported, high-speed disk drives and exceptionally fast host connections allows users to deliver faster decisions, speed time to market, maintain fast response times for rapid email movement.
Enhanced Service Level Agreements — Redundant and hot-swappable components, Hi-Track(r) phone home service and worldwide service and support allows customers to keep back office applications online, avoid prolonged Web outages and enable fast recovery when applications do fail.
Less Complexity and Lower Management Costs — Consolidated to allow users the ability to easily add-on high capacity storage systems, create SAN storage pools or deploy NAS appliances.
"With the launch of the new midrange Thunder 9200 subsystem, HDS has effectively raised the bar in the storage arena once again," said Josh Krisher, Research Director, Gartner Group. "Offering the highest scalability, leadership in advanced features, largest cache, and high performance, the Thunder is at the leading edge of midrange modular disk subsystems."
"Storage users demand scalability, performance and function," said John McArthur, Vice President of Storage Research at IDC. "With scalability to 7.2 terabytes, 800 megabytes per second bandwidth, and many of the data-copy functions found in higher-end products, the Thunder 9200 should be an attractive option for customers."
"With 2,400 MB/s internal bandwidth, the new Thunder 9200 should out-perform most midrange storage offerings," said Jack Scott, Managing Partner, The Evaluator Group. "Additionally, with new enterprise-class features such as remote copy and dynamic LUN management — features usually available only on larger subsystems — HDS has the opportunity to force the hand of quite a few storage vendors looking to stake new turf in the midrange storage wars."
Pricing of the Thunder 9200 will range from $15,000 to $300,000. The product will be generally available February 13.
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, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1999 (ended March 31, 2000) consolidated sales of 8,001 billion yen ($75.5 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.
1 At an exchange rate of 106 yen to the dollar.
Contacts: PR
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, Lightning 9200.
ShadowImage, and Hi-Track are trademarks of Hitachi Data
Systems.
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