Hitachi Data Systems shatters performance and capacity limitations of modular market.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), has announced the general availability of the Hitachi Thunder 9585V, the most recent platform addition to its line of Application Optimized Storage solutions (see separate press release: Hitachi Data Systems Introduces Industry's First Application Optimized Storage Solutions). With new levels of functionality, scalability and throughput it further extends the industry analyst recognized performance domination of the previously available Thunder 9580V. Outstripping its competitors, with up to 47 percent greater performance, the Thunder 9585V is optimized for applications that require extremely high capacity coupled with the highest performance criteria. Its capacity and scalability make it suitable for enterprise storage consolidation, and the common management framework between the Thunder 9500 V Series and Lightning 9900 V Series make the high performance Thunder 9585V a key component of an application optimized tiered storage architecture.

"Customers have a broad range of data storage needs," said John McArthur, Group Vice President, Storage Research, IDC. "While the Hitachi Thunder 9585V can satisfy a wide variety of data storage needs, it has been specifically optimized to meet the storage demands of I/O intensive applications and provides a good proof point of how HDS is delivering Application Optimized Storage Solutions."

"At Hitachi Data Systems, we are focused on delivering storage solutions that are optimized to satisfy our customer's unique application requirements," said Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. "With the Thunder 9585V we are lifting the ultra high-end modular storage bar even higher. This storage system has been specifically designed with the business requirements of high performance, high capacity applications in mind."

The Thunder 9585V satisfies the business need for high performance, high availability storage. It is optimized for input/output intensive applications such as rich media, data mining, high performance computing, and heavily used databases. The entire Thunder 9500 V Series storage systems are based upon Hitachi's exclusive Hi-PER Architecture which incorporates a superior hardware RAID design, with ultra high-speed interconnects, that delivers unsurpassed high performance. With a 40 percent faster logic processor running improved performance software the Thunder 9585V offers up to 47 percent greater performance than comparative products, reaching over 240,000 I/Os per second. It also boasts an enhancement to the controller microcode that provides optimization for rich media applications by dramatically increasing the sequential performance.

"The performance and capacity attributes of this modular array are well matched with our PetaSite enterprise storage library," said Steve Baker, Vice President of Tape Storage Solutions for Sony Electronics' Broadcast and Business Solutions Company. "The Sony Digital Archive and Broadcast Workflow Solution will enable companies to create, move, display, broadcast, store, and manage video and other digital data. By integrating the Thunder 9585V into our solution we will enable our customers to have fast cache, backup and retrieval--with greatly reduced batch windows increasing the time available for transaction-based applications."

"There remains a need for very high performance storage systems to support storage consolidation. Another need is to use the impressive sequential performance of the Thunder 9585V to reduce pressure on the backup window and data movement operations," said Greg Schulz, Senior Analyst, Evaluator Group. "And it has built-in head room to provide for many unplanned storage growth contingencies including adding more servers."

With industry leading capacity, performance, reliability and money saving virtual port connectivity, the Thunder 9585V is an ideal platform for storage consolidation. Scaling up to an industry-leading 64TB it has almost double the Fibre Channel connectivity of competing products. The Thunder 9500 V Series supports Virtual Storage Ports/Host Storage Domains, which allow up to 128 heterogeneous open systems server to connect per physical port, giving the Thunder 9585V system a maximum secure virtual port capacity of 1,024--allowing enterprises to scale up the connectivity without having to add storage units or fabric switches. The Thunder 9585V system's outstanding reliability is accomplished by making every part in the unit redundant and hot swappable, using a patrol function to continually test every part and disk drive, and providing Hi-Track "call home" and diagnostic support.

Pricing ranges from $100,000 for a 1 terabyte Thunder 9585V to $300,000 for a 10TB version. Existing Hitachi Data Systems customers with installed Thunder 9580V systems will find that moving up to the Thunder 9585V system is an easy data-in-place upgrade with no required power down.