Hitachi Unleashes New Series Of E-Business Mega Servers With World's Highest Performance and Availability - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Feb 14, 2000

Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., Monday introduced the Hitachi Skyline Trinium Nine Series, a new lineup of powerful mega servers designed to exploit the Web's capacity for e-business and provide the highest availability in the industry.

Capitalizing on the momentum of the Hitachi Skyline Trinium Eight Series -- with wide cross industry acceptance in such areas as finance, telecommunications, aerospace, energy, manufacturing, services, education, and government -- the new Trinium Nine Series is designed to run transaction-intensive enterprise Web applications faster than any S/390 server available. This dramatically increases the opportunity for users to conduct a greater number of revenue-producing business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions.

Otto Noack, Vice President, Systems Engineering at Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., the nation's fourth largest financial services firm and the world's largest online broker serving 6.6 million active accounts with $725 billion in customer assets, said, "We purchased the Hitachi Skyline Trinium for one specific reason: It offers the largest single-engine capacity on the planet, which is exactly what we were looking for."

Luis Martin Hernandez, CIO of Telcel, an industry-leading provider of telecommunication services, said, "The right IT infrastructure is important for true business success. That's why we recently selected the Hitachi Skyline Trinium to support our strategic IT initiatives. With its high availability architecture, fast instruction processors, and scalability, the Trinium proves that Hitachi is committed to delivering industry-leading servers with business-enabling back-up features."

Featuring the world's highest availability architecture for the System/390 environment, Trinium allows for large-scale enterprise server consolidation and provides IT managers with the comfort of knowing their business-critical applications are physically safe from unexpected hardware outages. The Trinium Nine Series can also significantly slash the level of complexity inherent in large e-businesses by reducing the number of physical images, interconnections, software licenses, overhead, operational complexity, and points of failure.

Understanding that e-business is about integration and achieving a state of infrastructure simplicity, Hitachi recently announced the iSuite, a comprehensive set of integrated infrastructure optimization solutions designed to complement the extreme availability architecture of the Trinium.

Targeted at companies striving to reach 100-percent continuous availability throughout the enterprise, the Hitachi iSuite offers consolidation, optimization, and total cost of ownership service methodologies that fulfill Hitachi's vision of allowing clients to focus on their business and not the technology upon which it runs.

"In the age of this e-obsession, infrastructure matters," said Alan Cade, Vice President and General Manager, Hitachi Data Systems Enterprise Server Business Unit. "Just by adding a Web front end to your internal system doesn't mean you're ready for e-business. In order to survive in this Internet-dominated world, e-tailers must ensure the highest availability, capacity, and workload surge protection in their infrastructure.

"That's why Hitachi created the Trinium; it's designed for companies who absolutely refuse to endure the cost of downtime, who need a server with virtually boundless scalability, and one that can absorb totally unpredictable upward spikes inherent in peak e-transaction processing."

Trinium Moves at Internet Speed The new Trinium Nine Series is the ultimate protection against unexpected Web traffic, and thrives on e-business unpredictability with its built-in system redundancies and industry-leading workload surge protection. With capacity to spare for existing core business applications, the Trinium Nine Series offers four key customer benefits that no other server can offer: the most stable environment possible, reduced cost, reduced risk, and reduced complexity.

In October of last year, Hitachi began shipping the highly successful Skyline Trinium Eight Series -- the first server to break the 2 BIPS (billion instructions per second) barrier -- and now Hitachi is first again with the new Trinium Nine Series, the only server on the planet to produce performance approaching the 3 BIPS barrier.

The Trinium Nine Series delivers 262 MIPS (million instructions per second) per instruction processor, and performs at nearly 3 BIPS when configured with 16 instruction processors, fulfilling Hitachi's statement of intent issued last February, and making it the world's most powerful commercial enterprise server.

Thanks to new breakthrough technology from Hitachi, the Trinium Nine Series offers the highest multi-processing (MP) factor in the history of System/390, S/370, and S/360 servers, thereby allowing customers to obtain more business benefits from each processing cycle. This technology enables Trinium to outperform any competitive mainframe at every stage of system scaling, all the way from a two-processor system to a fully configured 16-processor system.