Hitachi Unveils High-End, Midrange Array Updates

Hitachi Data Systems last week brought out new versions of its high-end and midrange storage arrays with upgrades that include RAID 6 features allowing for the failure of up to two disk drives without a loss of data.

In conjunction with the product announcement, Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will be reselling the high-end array as the XP10000, a scaled-down version of the XP12000 model it sources from Hitachi. At the same time, Sun Microsystems said it will resell Hitachi's new high-end device as the StorEdge 9985.

Hitachi is calling the NSC55 high-end array "a miniaturized version" of its TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP), which includes virtualization capabilities that let external storage from various vendor arrays be managed as if it was a single pool. Unlike the older version, the NSC55 array is rack-mountable.

Buyer's Remorse

Pat Burke, manager of IT services at Psion Teklogix, said he wishes the XP10000 version of the NSC55 had been available from HP last fall, when he purchased an XP12000.

He called the older machine a "solid" workhorse but said the XP10000 "meets all the needs of our XP12000 now but at lower cost. It's really more of the same technology."

The NSC55 scales from five to 240 disk drives and has up to 69TB of internal storage capacity. Hitachi claims it can manage up to 16 petabytes of external storage. The array also supports Hitachi's high-end internally switched architecture, logical partitioning and data replication features. List prices start at about US$150,000 for a 5TB model.

"Hitachi is making the USP within the reach of a much larger audience," said Greg Schultz, an analyst at Evaluator Group.

Hitachi, which previously called its midrange arrays the Thunder 9500V line, said its new TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) and lower-end Workgroup Modular Storage (WMS) models feature RAID 6 data protection, virtualization capabilities and the ability to split a port so it can be accessed by multiple hosts. They also support 4Gbit/sec. Fibre Channel port connectivity, Hitachi said.

The AMS systems offer a mix of both Fibre Channel and lower-cost Serial ATA drives. The WMS line can be configured with SATA drives only for low-cost near-line storage applications, which could be used for purposes such as archiving data for regulatory compliance.

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