The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 Family Breaks the Barrier in Operational Efficiency and Redefines Midrange Storage

Modern businesses, no matter what size they are, face a major challenge in the future: how to manage ever increasing volumes of data, while figuring out how to increase staff efficiency and keeping purchases of new hardware and software to an absolute minimum. The new Hitachi midrange storage solution, the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family, addresses the needs of growing businesses by providing a high level of security, flexibility and scalability at every stage of growth.

The midrange storage segment must support growing businesses while reducing costs. Storage must support an ever increasing number of servers and applications, keep data secure and available, meet increasingly stringent government regulations, back up applications and provide disaster recovery capabilities, and stay flexible enough to meet the business' changing needs. At the same time, it must reduce backup windows, reduce power consumption and its associated costs, minimize management overhead, and keep storage costs down without affecting a growing organization's need for increased capacity.

That's a tall order for any storage system, but Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family systems fully meet the challenge. Breakthrough innovations in load balancing and architecture, combined with a simple, elegant and comprehensive management interface, deliver precisely the cost effective performance that growing businesses need. In an increasingly competitive business environment — and increasingly uncertain economic times — the Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family also provides the security, flexibility and scalability businesses need to protect their storage investments for years to come.

Increase Application Availability with the Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing Controller

The Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing Controller automatically and dynamically manages storage loads, dramatically simplifying storage administration while providing the superior levels of performance that growing businesses require. Its symmetrical active-active controller technology offers something unique: by decoupling the host system from specific LUN assignments, I/O traffic from hosts to disk drives can be dynamically managed, balanced and shared across both controllers, even if the I/O load to specific LUNS is skewed. Storage administration is simplified because there's no need to manage ownership between LUNs and controllers. Microcode can be updated online without disruption, because one controller can update while the other manages I/O requests. And the Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing Controller fully integrates all popular operating systems' multipathing and load balancing architectures, eliminating the need for proprietary multipathing software. This innovative new approach to load balancing delivers excellent performance along with the potential for serious cost reduction in the areas of software and storage administration.

Back End SAS Architecture Maximizes Performance

The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family uses a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface to transmit data from the controllers to the disk drives. This full duplex, point-to-point architecture isolates data paths, offering better performance than what is possible when sharing resources on an arbitrated loop. The point-to-point architecture also allows for failure isolation, which speeds error detection and lessens the impact of individual failures on overall system performance. SAS connectors are compatible with SATA disk drives, giving storage planners greater flexibility in meeting their tiered storage requirements. This combination of flexibility and greater efficiency lowers the total cost of ownership, raises return on investment, and contributes to an increased ability to meet service level agreements.

Easy, Intuitive Management

The Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family contains the same easy-to-use management interface as Hitachi Simple Modular Storage, which was designed for small business without storage expertise. This highly intuitive interface reduces management time and effort as it helps users manage all of the operations and features associated with Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family systems. Users can centralize and manage multiple systems and automate LUN and RAID setup, host attachment and data replication — all from a single pane of glass. Meanwhile, software wizards step users through common tasks. It's a simple, easy, efficient way to manage multiple Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family systems and Hitachi Simple Modular Storage from the same interface, and businesses do not need highly experienced storage administrators to use it.

 Analyst Report:
Addressing Business Challenges with a Scalable Storage Infrastructure
By IDC 

 White Paper:
Symmetric Active-Active Controller

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