Hitachi Data Systems claims to have upped the bar on high-end storage with its release of the Freedom Lightning Storage 2000 - the first of Hitachi`s range to use its Hi-Star technology. Hitachi says its Lightning 9900 offers 100% uptime.
Currently offering a maximum specification of 6.4GBps bandwidth, combined with 27TB of useable capacity (32 in total), the Lightning is targeted at customers looking for a highly scalable and reliable framework.
"Over the last two to three years, there has been a realisation in the IT industry that storage has underpinned everything we have done in the IT field," says Phil Jones, director of enterprise architecture and technology, Hitachi Europe, Middle East and Africa. "The industry has been treating storage as a Cinderella - now we are taking storage to the ball."
Jones singles out storage consolidation, the need for centralised management, business consistency and storage area networks as the reasons for migrating to the 9900.
A new internal crossbar-switch architecture is expected to lower bottlenecks within the storage unit itself, while the Hi-Star architecture replaces the traditional shared bus architecture, which will facilitate the handling of peak traffic, according to Hitachi. Currently 62 100MBps switches connect to the Hi-Star - 32 in and 32 out. Jones says Hitachi plans to up the bandwidth on these switches to 200MBps next year.
Hitachi makes a big splash about its open connectivity strategy - effectively throwing the gauntlet at the feet of major competitor EMC.
The 9900 is interoperable with Unix, Windows NT/2000, Linux, Novell Netware and IBM`s OS/390. The storage system will handle 4 096 logical addresses, and 32 concurrent transfers per channel. The Lightning offers up to 32 Fibre Channel or ESCON ports.
Hitachi plans to increase the number of LUNs, cache (currently 32GB of redundant dual cache), and Fibre paths to servers. It is also expected to release its storage on demand strategy next month - similar to Hewlett Packard`s Capacity-on-Demand, which it offers on its re-branded Hitachi products.
The Lightning 9900 will be available locally from new Hitachi distributor Shoden Data Systems.
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