Hitachi Hits Hard With Thunder And Lightning

HDS' new Thunder 9580V modular array will offer up to 64 Tbytes of raw capacity, doubling the storage space of the current Thunder 9570V, said Jim Beckman, director of hardware product marketing at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

The 9580V also will offer 7.4 GBps of cached bandwidth,more than twice that of EMC's Symmetrix DMX,and QuickShadow, a new feature that allows users to take point-in-time data snapshots, Beckman said.

HDS' Lightning 9900V enterprise-class array will get new software called Open LDEV Guard, which enables the Lightning to store data in a read-only format instead of going to an optical drive, Beckman said, explaining that such capability is useful for regulatory compliance. A particular file, for example, can be set so that it can be read but not modified or deleted for three years. After that time span, it can be deleted, and the disk space can be returned to the storage pool, he said.

Also new are Three Data Center Copy and HiCopy software. Three Data Center Copy enables customer data to be simultaneously replicated to two remote sites for disaster-recovery purposes, while HiCopy permits data to be replicated between a Lightning and a Thunder array, Beckman said.

"This will allow data to be replicated from the Lightning to a lower-priced modular array so that customers will not need another Lightning to do replication," he said.

Oliver Poppenberg, vice president of sales at Perfect Order, a Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based solution provider that works with both HDS arrays, said he's excited to see the vendor adding many of the data replication features found in competitors' arrays,especially the ability to replicate between a Lightning and a Thunder array.

"Anything a vendor does to help clients cut costs is very welcome," Poppenberg said.

With the new products, HDS continues to prove its technical mettle, but the vendor and its partners remain hampered by a lack of brand-name recognition, according to Poppenberg. "They have great technology, but hardly anyone knows them," he said.