New Thunder 9200 SE Designed to Meet Customer Demand for Fast Deployment of Consolidated, Easy-to-Manage SAN Solutions
Company Emphasizes Continuing Support for S/390 Environments; Intends to Deliver FICON Connectivity in First Quarter 2002
SANTA CLARA and SAN JOSE, California, 11 September, 2001 — Hitachi Data Systems and Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade®) (Nasdaq: BRCD), the world's leading provider of infrastructure for Storage Area Networks (SANs), announced today the Thunder 9200 SAN Enabler (SE), a "ready-to-go" SAN, integrating Hitachi Freedom Storage™ Thunder 9200™ storage with two Brocade SilkWorm® fabric switches in a single, rack-mounted configuration. This new package provides customers with an easy way to purchase, implement, and support new or existing enterprise SANs.
Brocade SilkWorm fabric switches provide the world's leading intelligent networking foundation for SANs, while the Thunder 9200, a member of the Hitachi Freedom Storage 9000 all-fibre family, delivers massive scalability and unparalleled performance. With this best-of-breed bundle, customers can now quickly connect servers with storage devices through a SAN, creating a highly reliable and manageable environment for storage applications. Customers also get a quick-start in building their SAN infrastructures and in realizing return on their investments.
"We are pleased to continue to work with Hitachi Data Systems to provide our mutual customers with storage networking solutions that speed SAN deployment," said Jay Kidd, vice president of Product Marketing, Brocade. "The Thunder 9200 SE helps customers take the guesswork out of setting up a SAN and realize the benefits of networking their storage environments, which include enhanced availability, scalability, manageability, and security."
The Thunder 9200 SE provides customers with a quick start to deploy a high-availability, switched-fabric SAN that addresses a variety of business issues typically faced by companies with rapidly growing IT infrastructures. Customers can now easily create consolidated storage pools that maximize efficiency and minimize management complexity, while allowing storage to grow independently of servers-thus achieving substantial cost savings. As a certified package, the Thunder 9200 SE delivers additional benefits, such as fast and efficient ordering, streamlined installation, simplified trouble-shooting, and a single point of contact for support.
"When you want to provide customers with the highest quality, easiest-to-install SAN solutions, it makes a lot of sense to combine the best products in the business," said Marlene Woodworth, vice president, Enterprise Products and Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems. "As far as performance, reliability, and capacity go, the Thunder 9200 has proven to be without peer. And Brocade is the market leader in SAN infrastructure. Add the two together and customers get a winning combination."
The Thunder 9200 SE is available immediately.
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 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.
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.hitachi.com.
¹ At an exchange rate of 124 yen to the dollar.
Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) offers the industry's leading intelligent platform for networking storage. The world's leading systems, applications, and storage vendors have selected Brocade to provide a networking foundation for their SAN solutions. The Brocade SilkWorm® family of fabric switches and software is designed to optimize data availability and storage and server resources in the enterprise. Using Brocade solutions, companies can simplify the implementation of storage area networks, reduce the total cost of ownership of data storage environments, and improve network and application efficiency. For more information, visit the Brocade website at http://www.brocade.com or contact the company at info@brocade.com.
Contacts: PR
Jodi Reinman, Hitachi Data Systems, (408) 970.1050, jodi.reinman@hds.com
Fenella Tigner, Brocade, (408) 392-6843, ftigner@brocade.com
Bill Murphy, Brocade, (408) 487-8022, investor-relations@brocade.com
Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. Brocade, Extended Fabrics, Fabric Aware, Fabric Integrator, Fabric OS, Fabric Threads, Fabric Watch, Fabric Weaver, QuickLoop, SilkWorm, SilkWorm Express, and SOLUTIONware are trademarks or registered trademarks of Brocade Communications Systems Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of, and are used to identify, products or services of their respective owners.
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