Lightning 9900 is First to Integrate 2 Gigabit per Second
Fibre Channel Connectivity in High-End Storage
Company Emphasizes Continuing Support for S/390 Environments;
Intends to Deliver FICON Connectivity in First Quarter 2002
SANTA CLARA, California, 10 September, 2001 — After an earlier twenty percent performance enhancement, Hitachi Data Systems today took another step forward in solidifying its position as the performance leader in enterprise data storage systems. It announced a number of performance enhancements to the Hitachi Freedom Storage™ Lightning 9900™ system, highlighted by the availability of 2-Gigabit per second Fibre Channel connectivity.
The Lightning 9900 is the industry's first high-end storage system to deploy 2 Gbps technology, increasing performance by as much as 40 percent over the earlier 1 Gbps technology. Shipping of the advanced capability will begin in October.
"With today's announcement Hitachi Data Systems becomes the first company to offer 2 Gbps capability across our entire product line," said Ron Gervenack, Hitachi Data Systems Executive Vice President and General Manager, Storage Solutions. "Leveraging its internal switched architecture, the industry-leading throughput of the Lighting 9900 will be greatly improved with this new high-speed Fibre Channel adapter. Customers will benefit from faster access to their information and quicker decision making."
"HDS was the first enterprise storage vendor to market with 2-gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity on its midrange Thunder 9200 platform, and continues to lead the industry by launching 2-gigabit high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity on its Lightning 9900 Series platform," said Robert M. Montague, Managing Director of System Area Networks Research at securities firm Dain Rauscher Wessels. "HDS' other system enhancements unveiled today also underscore HDS' position among the leaders in the enterprise RAID storage market."
Launched in June 2000, the Lightning 9900 introduced the revolutionary Hi-Star™ "internal switch" architecture that made it the highest performing storage system in the industry with an effective internal bandwidth of 6.4 Gigabytes per second. The performance gain was obtained by eliminating the inherent bottlenecks experienced by widely used systems based on the long-established "shared bus" architecture.
The performance increases achieved with 2 Gbps connections are in addition to a substantial improvement to the Lightning 9900 made earlier this year. In February, Hitachi Data Systems made available advanced technology that boosts the Lightning's performance by as much as 20 percent when used in configurations where a large number of servers feed data in parallel into the storage system. Users of large databases are among those who can accomplish substantially more work by taking advantage of this capability.
The introduction of 2Gbps Fibre Channel adapters will enable high-speed remote copy using Hitachi TrueCopy, initially for open systems and shortly thereafter for S/390® users. With this new capability, customers will be able to improve disaster recovery and backup/restore operations.
In a statement of intent, Hitachi Data Systems also highlighted its continuing support for customers operating S/390-based data centers by announcing that it intends to support IBM's high-speed FICON®-connectivity. General availability is planned for First Quarter 2002. This capability will be beneficial in substantially decreasing data recovery time for customers implementing disaster recovery solutions at distant sites.
Hitachi Data Systems is a leading supplier of storage hardware, software, solutions and services. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), Japan's largest electronics company, HDS is committed to providing the technological infrastructure for the world's most information-intensive corporations.
With 2,900 employees, Hitachi Data Systems does business in the public and private sectors in 60 countries on six continents, including the rapidly emerging economies in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies, and all of the major Storage Service Providers (SSPs). For more information, please visit the company's Website at www.hds.com.
Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 2000 (ended March 31, 2001) consolidated sales of 8,417 billion yen ($67.9 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 www.global.hitachi.com.
¹ At an exchange rate of 124 yen to the dollar.
Contacts: PR
Bob Neudecker, Hitachi Data Systems, (408) 970-4450, bob.neudecker@hds.com
Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. Freedom Storage, Hi-Star, Lightning 9900, and Thunder 9200 are trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems.
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