Hitachi Data Systems Sets New Standard in Midrange with Feature Rich NAS Platform

Sept. 10, 2009 - PRLog -- SANTA CLARA, Calif.  — Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd.  and the only provider of Service Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced the general availability of its new Hitachi Network Attached Storage (NAS) Platform, powered by BlueArc®, with two new solutions that push the envelope in performance, scalability, consolidation and management for midrange storage. The new Hitachi NAS 3080 and 3090 offer the most integrated native Intelligent File Tiering capability in midrange today, and include a variety of benefits designed specifically to increase productivity and simplify storage management. With the new Hitachi NAS Platform, customers can achieve up to 30 percent Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings over competitive offerings available today.

“We offer organizations the most fully integrated, unified midrange storage solution to help them get a handle on their data and use it to manage their organization. Today, we are furthering our commitment to our customers by extending our NAS portfolio,” said Miki Sandorfi, chief strategist, File and Content Services, Hitachi Data Systems. “Unlike other storage vendors that provide cobbled together, siloed solutions with disparate management, Hitachi Data Systems combines storage management software, content archiving, and data discovery solutions in one integrated platform to minimize complexity and reduce storage CAPEX and OPEX.”

Organizations are facing exponential growth of unstructured data, putting increased demands on their limited IT budgets. To make do, organizations often consolidate file servers with NAS solutions that lack the scalability and performance and cause NAS proliferation. The new Hitachi NAS Platform tops the industry with up to 2 petabytes of capacity and 100K IOPS per node, which enables the most robust consolidation for midrange companies. Many organizations also plan to move less accessed data to lower cost storage tiers but are challenged without an integrated management tool to automate the process. The new Hitachi NAS Platform offers native Intelligent Tiering capability and are tightly integrated with the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite to enable customers to move data automatically among Fibre channel, SAS, SATA and archive tiers based on pre-set policies, search the content across storage silos and use the search results to trigger data movement.

Combined with enhanced performance, scalability and management capabilities, the Hitachi NAS Platform provides customers a flexible foundation to achieve more operational benefits at a lower cost. In addition, this solution is a great fit for midrange customers with mixed storage environments, as common management between the Hitachi NAS platform and Hitachi SAN technologies can be achieved with a single interface and without the additional management layer competitor solutions require.

New Hitachi NAS Platform Features
The Hitachi NAS 3080 and 3090 offer high end performance and scalability at a midrange price for “pay-as-you-grow” flexibility and simplified management of storage resources. With this midrange solution, customers can now leverage a rich set of features and functionality without the traditional complexity. Specifically, it includes the industry’s most integrated file based tiering, enabling customers to automatically migrate between high cost and low cost storage media to simplify management and balance performance with storage utilization.

The Hitachi NAS Platform is optimized with Hitachi storage systems and the Hitachi Storage Command Suite, offering customers a single console for management of unified NAS and SAN environments. Similarly, Hitachi NAS is fully integrated with commercial application environments such as Microsoft® Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Oracle while used in VMware vSphere environments. Application administrators can use Hitachi NAS for their primary (iSCSI) and secondary backup, restore, archiving and disaster recovery storage.

The entry Hitachi NAS 3080 model reaches 1 petabyte of capacity. The Hitachi NAS 3090 reaches 2 petabytes and supports 256 terabytes of file system, vastly superior than the 16 terabyte file system size offered with most other NAS offerings available today.

The new Hitachi NAS Platform is designed specifically for data-driven organizations in a variety of markets and is especially suited for healthcare applications. With Hitachi's single, integrated platform for all content types, healthcare providers can easily tackle the large amount of content they manage everyday – from file, content to block – all from a single pane of management. The new Hitachi NAS Platform accelerates access to all data types such as patient records and billing information, consolidates the IT environment and simplifies the electronic management of patient records as they move through their lifecycles.

Additional Quotes

   * Mark Peters, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group: “Although packaged for midrange users, Hitachi Data Systems’ new 3080 and 3090 NAS offerings feature functionality more usually associated with enterprise class systems. Specifically, the ease of management and the native file tiering capabilities of these products will help them to stand out in a crowded marketplace, whether used standalone or integrated into a Hitachi-managed virtualized and heterogeneous hierarchy.”
   * Carl Fulp, Vice President of Engineering and Services, ViON Corporation: “The new midrange Hitachi NAS 3080 and 3090 are a welcome addition to the Hitachi storage family. Our partners and customers have long asked for a more affordable NAS solution, and now we have it with the scalability and reliability found in high end versions. These new models are going to open many new doors for us, particularly in federal, financial services, healthcare and entertainment media markets.”

Availability
The new Hitachi NAS platform is immediately available through Hitachi Data Systems direct sales and channel partners.

Web Resources
Hitachi Data Systems storage gurus and Tony Asaro offer additional perspectives on the company’s growing midrange NAS platform:

   * Miki: http://blogs.hds.com/miki
   * Bill: http://blogs.hds.com/bill
   * Tony: http://blogs.hds.com/tony

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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. With over 4,100 employees, and 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 / TSE- 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 400,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2008 (ended March 31, 2009) consolidated revenues totaled 10,000 billion yen ($102.0 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, logistics and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.
Press Contacts:

Hitachi Data Systems
Melissa Rische
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melissa.rische@hds.com

Bite Communications
Ashish Patel
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