Hitachi Data Systems Enhances Freedom Storage 7700E; Introduces New Business Continuity Software Providing Bulletproof Foundation for E-commerce - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Feb 21, 2000

Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., Monday announced new capabilities for its flagship storage subsystem - the Hitachi Freedom Storage 7700E. With these enhancements, Hitachi Data Systems brings to open-systems environments its Asynchronous Remote Copy and ShadowImage software, the 7700E's powerful data-center-proven solutions for data replication and business continuity. Other enhancements apply new technology - including high-speed, 47 gigabyte (GB) disk drives - to improve 7700E performance, capacity, and manageability. The company also announced it has extended 7700E open-systems support to include Red Hat Linux, Microsoft Windows 2000, and the newest version of Novell NetWare.

Together, these enhancements provide welcome peace of mind to Internet-based business customers, who are well aware of the significant costs that can be incurred as a result of data loss or loss of access to data. With their requirements for continuous service, scalable capacity, and ease-of-management, e-commerce and Web-hosting applications place unprecedented new demands on storage subsystems, which must significantly reduce the overall cost of ownership while increasing productivity and efficiency.

"The Hitachi Freedom Storage 7700E continues to be the storage platform by which the industry measures its progress," said Richard Search, vice president of storage product management and marketing. "When customers think of bulletproof storage, they think of the 7700E. It's the best, and the best is getting better. The features and functions we're introducing today bring new levels of availability, performance, and capacity to support the new Internet-driven business models. Our 'better than ever' 7700E can help e-commerce customers avoid the outages and performance deterioration that have plagued such ventures."

The 7700E's unsurpassed reliability has earned the respect of the world's most demanding data centers and has led Hitachi Data Systems to offer an industry-first cash guarantee of 100-percent data availability.

Open Systems Business Continuity with Asynchronous Remote Copy and ShadowImage Hitachi Data Systems brings to the open-systems world its powerful Hitachi Open Asynchronous Remote Copy function, the industry-leading business-continuity software solution, battle-proven in mainframe-based data centers. Hitachi Data Systems had previously offered Hitachi Open Synchronous Remote Copy for open-systems computing. The new Hitachi Open Asynchronous Remote Copy -generally available now for use with the 7700E -- is capable of moving large amounts of data over any distance from one 7700E to another with complete data integrity and minimal impact on performance. These copies may be used for disaster recovery, data vaulting, or business intelligence applications.

Another addition to the open-systems arsenal of tools for protecting data is Hitachi ShadowImage software, a non-disruptive means of making point-in-time copies. Enhancements for ShadowImage announced Monday enable open-systems users to create, at hardware speed, up to nine RAID-protected copies of data within a single 7700E subsystem. These "cascaded" copies can be used concurrently for applications such as disaster recovery, applications testing, offline database backup, and data mining. If anything should happen to the source data, one of the copies can take its place through a reverse synchronization procedure.

Hitachi Path Manager software, also new today, eliminates the server's host bus adapter as a single point of failure by automatically detecting a failed path between the server and the 7700E. Moreover, Path Manager dynamically balances the load across multiple paths, automatically recognizing multiple paths to each logical unit of storage.

To provide higher levels of availability in Windows server environments, Hitachi Data Systems completed its testing for Microsoft Cluster Server certification under both Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.

Open Systems Performance Management with Hitachi Dynamic Optimizer The new Hitachi Dynamic Optimizer software announced Monday automatically monitors 7700E subsystem activity and applies policy-based rules to optimize performance. Depending on the level of physical disk performance, RAID type, access patterns, and other decision parameters that affect the performance of specific applications, the Dynamic Optimizer identifies optimal placement of logical volumes within the subsystem. This option is supported on Hitachi's full range of open-systems platforms and is scheduled for general availability in February.

Hitachi FlashAccess for the 7700E is a software tool for use with open-systems platforms that can lead to significant improvement in subsystem performance - as much as an 800-percent improvement in transaction-processing capability in some applications. FlashAccess enables critical data to be locked into high-speed cache within the subsystem, substantially reducing the time to retrieve frequently requested information. It is well suited for use with database log files, which are highly active and typically have relatively small block sizes. Flash Access is available now on most platforms.