Hitachi Data Systems accelerates lead in high-end storage.

Continuing to deliver on its TrueNorth roadmap, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has 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 massive consolidation 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."