Hitachi Announces a New Trajectory in Storage Performance and Scalability with Universal Storage Platform V -- World's Most Advanced Storage Services Platform

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today ushered in a new era of enterprise storage performance and scalability with the introduction of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ V, an all-new intelligent storage services platform with the ability to significantly outperform any storage system on the planet with a blistering 3.5 million input output operations per second (IOPS) of maximum performance, and, fueled by its next generation large-scale heterogeneous virtualization layer and Hitachi architectural innovations, substantially increase virtualized storage port performance for external storage by up to 500-percent over its predecessor. "The USP V takes performance to another level,” said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "This is also innovation at its best — improving the architecture of a storage system to raise its performance at nearly all levels — in leaps. Performance is not discussed as often as it should be — if your applications don’t perform well — then your business suffers.” Hitachi today also announced the world’s first 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel Switch (FSW) backplane in an enterprise-class storage platform, making Hitachi the only company with a switched internal architecture and a unique switched backplane architecture as well, providing customers with the fastest, most cost-effective way to process and transfer data through a storage controller engine — and with more immediate access to — and storage of — their business-critical data. "Hitachi continues to set the bar for enterprise-class controller-based heterogeneous storage virtualization supporting common storage services,” said Carl Greiner, senior vice president, Infrastructure and Software, OVUM. "The announcement of the USP V begins to render any controller performance or scalability issues mute and virtualization-enabled Dynamic Provisioning allows storage utilizations to exceed 85-percent, delivering unique economies to storage infrastructures. This announcement most definitely takes storage virtualization to a new level.” The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V facilitates synergistic linkages across a broad spectrum of enterprise, midrange and low-end storage systems, delivering unified, advanced storage services that span multi-dimensional virtualization, provisioning, partitioning, and replication capabilities — in effect enhancing the value of clients’ existing storage environments. "One of the most compelling aspects of the new Hitachi USP V is that it provides three dimensions of storage virtualization,” added Asaro. "The first is its internal virtualization capability that includes thin provisioning, large logical storage pools, wide striping, virtual partitions, and quality-of-service. The second virtualization dimension of the USP V is its external storage virtualization software managing heterogeneous storage systems and its capabilities as a high-end platform that provides best-in-class performance, scalability and reliability. The third virtualization dimension is that you can take all of the considerable intelligence and functionality within the USP V and extend it to any class of storage you have in the data center. Hitachi provides all three dimensions within its flagship storage system — driving innovation where it is needed and executing on a vision that provides real value to end-users.” "Hitachi continues to lead the enterprise storage market through new innovations,” said Gary Pilafas, managing director, Enterprise Architecture, United Airlines. "Hitachi’s implementation of thin provisioning brings the first enterprise-class solution to market with extremely high levels of performance and scalability. The new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V will continue to change the face of storage economics by lowering enterprise total cost of storage ownership.” The Most Scalable Storage Platform on Earth: 3.5 Million IOPS of Maximum Performance With the newly finessed and refined fourth generation massively parallel crossbar switch architecture as its engine — the all new mega-scalable Hitachi Universal Star Network™ V — the Universal Storage Platform V delivers 3.5 Million IOPS, an advantage of between 75-500-percent over other enterprise storage systems in the market and a substantial 40-percent increase over the current Hitachi Universal Storage Platform, providing customers with a new storage services platform with essentially no limitation as its limitation. The Hitachi Universal Star Network V remains the only architecture in the storage industry featuring a crossbar switch ASIC design and separate, dedicated internal networks for data and control (meta data), which enables the platform to deliver advanced storage services such as storage-agnostic universal replication, large-scale virtualization, logical partitioning and the newly announced Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning™ software, Large Logical Storage Pools and Wide Striping (see separate press release). "In May of 2006 our models showed that for large configurations, best-of-breed competitive storage solutions consumed 50-percent more budget dollars than the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform. One would expect such a sizable advantage to erode in twelve months but that’s not the case,” said David Floyer, chief technical officer and co-founder, ITCentrix, a leading CIO consultancy. "Our latest models show that for similarly configured systems, competitive offerings consume 60-percent more budget dollars than the new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, demonstrating that Hitachi is actually increasing its total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage relative to the competition.” "While scoring a number of industry ‘firsts,’ the Hitachi USP V is the first self-contained, pre-integrated, Services Oriented Storage platform that scales to petabyte levels while maintaining a manageable and predictable operating environment over the lifecycle of the product,” said John Webster, principal IT advisor, Illuminata. "The USP V also offers an opportunity to further consolidate disparate storage platforms and reduce the number of vendors IT users have to manage.” Hitachi Marks the Rise of Green Storage Environmental issues are permeating budget discussions, data center designs, corporate and government policy and social consciousness. The need to assess, design and implement appropriate power policies grows daily and Hitachi is strongly committed to providing eco-friendly solutions for this important area. "Hitachi can look at performance environmental information in a distinctive way by virtue of its unique ability to separate the controller from the back-end disks; others look at these environmentals from within the controller-disk commixture,” said Tom Trainer, senior analyst, Evaluator Group. "Additionally, Hitachi’s universal storage controller engines can manage thousands of terabytes behind a single engine with literally hundreds of power-friendly processors but more capacity per processor than competitive offerings, thereby extending material power, cooling and space advantages to customers. The Hitachi USP V supports 247 petabytes — with competitors supporting one petabyte, or fewer. From an overall power and cooling perspective, one can easily equate this to comparing snow cones to cappuccinos.” Hitachi intelligent virtual storage controllers separate the commodity media (the disks) from the intelligent controller required to provide storage, data and content services, providing total flexibility for IT organizations. In conjunction with Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager software, the new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V recognizes and addresses the constantly changing requirements of applications, allowing data to be frequently migrated between storage tiers to maintain an optimal location — enabling clients to ensure that their data is always residing on "the right shade of green.” Additionally, customers can benefit from new Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software for reduced administration costs and improved utilization; resulting in lower "carbon footprints” and improved application availability. Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software enables clients to save power and money, and provides the economic benefits to clients that will make their data center environments more eco-friendly. "ITCentrix’s analysis of market leading high-end storage solutions shows that for I/O-intensive configurations of between 54 terabytes to 134 terabytes, competitive solutions consume 24-percent to 52-percent more budget for power, cooling and space over a five-year period than comparably configured Hitachi USP Vs using virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning,” said Dave Vellante, president and CEO of ITCentrix. SuperCharge Existing Assets: 500-Percent Increase in Virtualized Storage Port Performance for External Storage The sophistication of internal traffic handling within the new Universal Star Network V architecture has been elevated to levels beyond that of its predecessor — and beyond competing offerings — with advanced processor algorithms and new workload distribution amongst multi-processors. This advanced massively parallel processing design improves the sequence of operations within the architecture, fueling a new wave of performance and scalability possibilities in the enterprise. The Universal Star Network V architecture elevates the performance of externally attached storage devices with a massive 500-percent increase in external storage port performance — essentially providing customers with the ability to improve the performance of externally attached storage devices as they utilize the caching algorithms and massive throughput of Hitachi’s latest flagship storage services platform. "Dealing with ever more complex and fast paced growth in information assets poses major challenges for today’s data center executives as they must balance boost responsiveness, performance, and capacity while keeping a tight control on costs,” said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems Research, IDC. "Solutions like Hitachi’s new USP V, with its next generation of virtual storage controllers and advanced storage services, provides a foundation for 'super charging' the capabilities and usefulness of storage assets in the data center, regardless of type, cost, or functionality.” Major Breakthroughs in Single Port Performance: Improved Application Response Time, Availability By virtue of the multi-processor sequencing enhancements to the Universal Star Network V architecture, vastly improved single port performance has been attained, ensuring that response times for business-critical applications such as SAP R3, Oracle Financials and Microsoft SQL Server are reduced while performance and throughput reaches a new velocity. "These smart enhancements enable Hitachi to provide more cost-effective and predictive performance and scalability to customers,” said Brian Garrett, technical director, Enterprise Strategy Group Lab. "ESG Lab tested the Hitachi USP V and confirmed that more processing power per port, control memory and back-end bandwidth than the previous generation USP provides predictable performance scalability across a wide variety of applications.” Key improvements in single port performance for the Universal Storage Platform V compared to its predecessor include an increase of 520-percent for writes to disk and 210-percent for reads from disk. Hitachi today also announced that the performance of its Hitachi Universal Replicator journal groups software has increased by 130-percent, while Hitachi TrueCopy® Synchronous software link performance has increased by 200-percent. What this means to businesses is that key functions such as replication and copy services and applications that require high levels of performance (e.g. certain database and backup applications) will benefit from higher, more consistent and easier-to-manage performance profiles. The increased performance capabilities will also enable superior tiered storage deployments, and file-based services such as archiving and high-performance NAS. Introducing the New Hitachi Universal Star Network V Architecture; Myriad Controller Enhancements Throughout "Hitachi has once again proven that it can use the entire resource base of a technology company to produce an out-of-the-ordinary storage services platform,” said Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer, Hitachi Data Systems. "Hitachi’s ability to design a massively parallel crossbar switch architecture and separate data cache and control memory networks has provided the foundation from which the company continues to innovate on. No other storage architecture can provide this level of optimization, performance, or advanced storage services to thousands of externally attached storage devices. Moreover, Hitachi has architected security into the core of its storage controllers with the separation of control and data and the implementation of logical partitioning software, unlike other vendors who look at security as something to simply repackage around their storage system. With the Universal Storage Platform V, Hitachi has achieved what other storage companies have yet to envision and has clearly extended its leadership position in high-end, enterprise storage solutions.” The new fourth generation massively parallel crossbar switch architecture from Hitachi now features full 4 Gigabit per second (4 Gb/s) Fibre Channel connectivity from front-end directors to back-end disks, including the introduction of the world’s first 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel Switch backplane in an enterprise-class storage platform — unlike competitors whose aging system designs continue to be plagued by the use of arbitrated loops to access back-end disks. Hitachi today also announced that its Universal Star Network V architecture is capable of 320 concurrent internal memory operations — 900-percent greater than competitive offerings. As a key enabler for much of the advanced storage services functionality that the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V provides to internal and external storage resources, control memory has doubled from 16 GB to 32 GB, with dedicated control paths increasing 33-percent to 256. Accordingly, dedicated control (meta data) bandwidth has increased by 138-percent to 38 GigaBytes per second (GB/s), enabling greatly improved application throughput and transfer. Total internal bandwidth — comprised of the Universal Star Network V’s industry-unique, dedicated, separate data and control networks — increases by 31-percent to 106 GigaBytes per second, a 560-percent advantage over actual bandwidth available in other offerings. Whereas competitors continue to struggle with as little as 64 front-end Fibre Channel ports, the new Universal Storage Platform V offers clients 224 front-end 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel ports — an advantage of 250-percent — shattering through the connectivity bottlenecks that saturate aging monolithic systems in the enterprise space. Demonstrating the company’s continued commitment to the ever-important mainframe market, the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V supports 112 4Gb/s FICON ports and 112 ESCON ports, advantages of up to 130-percent and 75-percent, respectively, over other offerings. Additionally, the Universal Storage Platform V supports 64,000 open systems volumes, a 300-percent increase over its predecessor. Internal controller boards in the Universal Storage Platform V have been reduced to half the previous height, providing substantially denser packaging, enabling better serviceability with less disruption and providing more flexible configuration options for customers. "Hitachi, with the new USP V, raises the bar even higher,” said Josh Krischer, founder, Josh Krischer & Associates, a leading storage consulting firm. "Hitachi is the only high-end storage vendor to introduce controller-based virtualization, multiple logical partitions, storage-agnostic array-based replication and is now the first with enterprise-class thin provisioning. All of these software innovations combined with continued impressive architectural enhancements and robust hardware entrench the USP V's position on the leading-edge of high-end storage subsystems.” "There is no doubt that Hitachi’s Universal Storage Platform V is the highest performing solution in the marketplace today,” added Vellante. "But there is much more to this story. Customers today face performance challenges in delivering high function storage services such as remote replication. This architecture enables the delivery of storage services, like Dynamic ‘Thin’ Provisioning, without performance constraints and eliminates the need to throw more controllers at the problem. In percentage terms, this translates into double digit reductions in total cost of ownership, and triple digit improvements in business benefit as measured in better responsiveness and reduced risk.” About Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Data Systems Corporation provides Services Oriented Storage Solutions that enable heterogeneous storage to be dynamically provisioned according to business needs and centrally managed via industry-leading Hitachi storage virtualization software. As an integral part of the Hitachi Storage Solutions Group, Hitachi Data Systems delivers storage infrastructure platforms, storage management software, and storage consulting services through direct and indirect channels in over 170 countries and regions. Its customers include nearly 60-percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.hds.com. About Hitachi, Ltd. Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 356,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2005 (ended March 31, 2006) consolidated sales totaled 9,464 billion Yen ($80.9 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com. © 2007, Hitachi is a registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Hitachi Data Systems is a registered trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, services marks, company names are properties of their respective owners.