Hitachi Heralds Improved Array
“It’s evidence that HDS is committed to the industry and is continuing to innovate,” said Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based solution provider.
HDS CTO Hu Yoshida, said the introduction of the AMS1000 replaces the company’s Thunder 9585V and effectively closed out its Thunder family of arrays.
The AMS1000 features non-disruptive data migration within the device to allow customers to move data between different tiers of storage, Yoshida said.
The array can be configured with a mix of Fibre Channel and SATA hard drives. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives eventually will become part of the mix, he added.
The AMS1000 offers a cached bandwidth of 13 Gbps, which is 70 percent faster than the 9585V, Yoshida said. It has a 4 Gbps Fibre Channel interface, compared to the 9585V’s 2 Gbps interface, and doubles the older model’s cache to 16 Gbytes, he said.
The array’s capacity can be divided into up to 32 logical cache partitions to ensure that problems with one application will not affect others, Yoshida said. It allows users to choose any combination of two connectivity protocols simultaneously, including iSCSI, NAS and Fibre Channel, without the need for external servers or controllers, he said.
Each of the eight physical ports can be configured into up to 128 virtual ports, a feature that Teter said is important in getting the best performance.
“HDS didn’t just come out with some expensive virtualization product like [EMC’s] Invista or [IBM’s] SVC,” Teter said. “They provide the performance and manageability that allows the virtualization of storage while lowering the cost of virtualization."
Joe Kadlec, vice president and senior partner at Consiliant Technologies, Irvine, Calif., said the AMS1000’s huge front-end cache means big gains in performance. “With the extra cache, they can partition the applications with bigger chunks of memory.”
The AMS1000 is already available to HDS solution providers. It can be configured with a maximum capacity of 208 Tbytes. The average configuration with a mix of Fibre Channel and SATA drives totaling between 15 Tbytes and 20 Tbytes has a list price of between $115,000 and $130,000, a company spokesperson said.