Doubles Capacity, Connectivity, and Throughput for Unparalleled Consolidation, Lowered TCO and Accelerated ROI
Enables a New Blueprint for Networked Storage Core to Edge Solutions in Conjunction with Thunder 9500 V Series Storage Systems
SANTA CLARA, California — January 29, 2003 — Continuing to deliver on its TrueNorth™ roadmap, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), today unveiled enhanced capacity, connectivity, and throughput options for the Hitachi Freedom Storage™ Lightning 9900™ V Series, the undisputed leader in high-end RAID systems. These enhancements, combined with the second-generation Hi-Star™ crossbar switch-based architecture and virtual storage ports enable enterprise customers to further lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) through of their storage systems.
"We believe that with this announcement Hitachi Data Systems continues to accelerate its technology leadership over the competition," said Don Young, Managing Director, Technology Equity Research, UBS Warburg. "The doubling of capacity combined with the high bandwidth of Hitachi's crossbar switch architecture and virtual storage ports are key differentiators between Hitachi's products and the competition. These features are very attractive for customers who are looking to consolidate storage and reduce costs."
"As customers have gained experience with and confidence in the Hi-Star architecture which delivers high bandwidth for consolidation, virtual private storage for high connectivity, and secure multi-host tenancy, Lightning 9980V™ installations have increased to an average of 20TB in capacity per system," said Hu Yoshida, vice president and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. "As a result, enterprise customers have consolidated high-capacity storage within a relatively small footprint, thereby reducing environmental, network, software licensing, and management costs."
By consolidating on the average five competitor's storage systems into one Lightning 9900 V Series system, many Hitachi Data Systems customers have realized 8-15 month payback. Hitachi Data Systems ROI tools can demonstrate the expected payback from investment in the enhanced Lightning 9900™ V Series.
"We need a reliable, scalable storage solution for our demanding development environment," said Surku Sinnadurai, CIO and senior vice president, i2 Technologies, the leading provider of end-to-end supply chain management solutions. "We evaluated other products on the market and found the Lightning 9980V gave us the greatest performance for our consolidation needs. By consolidating our storage systems with Hitachi Freedom Storage, we've been able to lower our total cost of ownership and achieve a quicker ROI."
John McArthur, Group Vice President of Storage Research at IDC, further confirms the benefits of consolidation: "Our research confirms that storage consolidation provides real operational benefits and delivers real savings. The latest enhancements to the Lightning 9900 V Series provide the foundation for massive consolidation.
Leveraging the centralized, consolidation capabilities of the Lightning 9900 V Series to run core applications and the granular scalability of the Thunder 9500 V Series for distributed applications, customers can maximize the power of their different architectures. The Lightning 9900 V Series serves as the platform that supports the highest levels of transaction rates for mixed application workloads, while the Thunder 9500 V Series provides the power to run local applications close to the end-user. This combination of core to edge networked storage, with the HiCommand™ common management framework and APIs, provides a new blueprint for distributing storage across the enterprise that closely aligns with customers' business data usage and budget requirements.
"We believe that customers need a blend of storage systems that perform core and edge functions and that these systems necessarily have different architectures. As such, Hitachi Data Systems will continue to bring to market advanced technology that supports this networked storage blueprint," said Dave Roberson, Hitachi Data Systems president and COO. "The new capabilities of the Lightning 9900 V Series allow us to maintain our lead in centralized storage and complement our efforts in new focus areas such as NAS, distributed storage, software and professional services. Expanding our leadership along these lines supports our goal of achieving overall storage leadership by 2004."
The industry-leading Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 V Series is now available with 146GB drives, effectively doubling total raw capacity of the original Lightning 9900 V series to 148TB and total usable capacity to 128TB in a RAID-5 configuration — ideal for consolidating many disk arrays based on aging shared bus architectures.
Connectivity has also increased, offering up to 32 FICON channels and 64 Fibre Channel connections at 2Gb per second, providing even greater potential for consolidation and significantly higher transactions rates.
In addition, the Lightning 9900 V Series features Virtual Storage Ports (VSPs) for SAN environments that provide unrestricted connectivity by enabling 128 different server platforms or operating systems to access the same physical 2Gb/s Fibre Channel port. In essence, each server has access to its own "virtual private storage" with complete data security. This provides true multi-tenant support for 4,096 different servers by isolating the effects of one server's storage domain from affecting other servers' storage.
The Lightning 9900 V Series continues to feature the massively parallel processing (MPP) Hi-Star crossbar switch-based architecture, introduced with the original Lightning 9900 Series in June 2000. This second generation architecture delivers unparalleled bottleneck-free performance with up to 15.9GB/s aggregate bandwidth. No other platform available today or in the near future can meet the performance scalability across application loads and capacity delivered by the Lightning 9900 V Series.
"Our research reveals that Hitachi has gained material marketshare in the high-end RAID storage market over the last two years, largely due to the leadership performance of its Lightning arrays," said A.M. (Toni) Sacconaghi, Jr., Senior Research Analyst for Enterprise Hardware at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Hitachi Data Systems enables organizations worldwide to exploit the full potential of information. Adhering to our TrueNorth™ vision and strategy, we provide customers with a broad range of storage solutions to simplify, protect and optimize their information infrastructures. Our offerings include centralized and distributed storage solutions complemented by best-of-breed products from channel partners and industry alliances.
With 2,700 employees, Hitachi Data Systems conducts business through direct and indirect channels in the public, government and private sectors in over 170 countries and regions. Our customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.
Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company, with approximately 320,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2001 (ended March 31, 2002) consolidated sales totaled 7,994 billion yen ($60.1 billion*). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors, including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's Web site at http://global.hitachi.com.
*At an exchange rate of 133 yen to the dollar.
Contacts: PR
Jodi Reinman, Hitachi Data Systems, (408) 970-1050, jodi.reinman@hds.com
Hitachi Freedom Storage, Lightning 9900, Lightning 9980V, HiCommand, and Hi-Star are registered trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
© Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd.
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