Hitachi Data Systems Storage Expert Hu Yoshida Outlines New Storage Network Paradigm to Overcome E-commerce Bottlenecks - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, June 12, 2000

Speaking at a GartnerGroup storage conference held last week, data networking expert Hubert Yoshida, vice president of data network solutions at Hitachi Data Systems, Tuesday described for the first time a new network paradigm for e-commerce. Citing parallels between the historical growth of the telecom industry and the emerging e-commerce industry, Yoshida outlined key issues, including the need for rapid growth management (scalability) and the provision of fast, continuous service for customers, and how switches enable the connectivity for both telephony and e-commerce.

To address bottlenecks in scalability and speed posed by current storage architectures, Yoshida proposed a new data storage paradigm in which data is passed through switching networks internal to storage subsystems, as well as through externally attached switching fabrics such as storage area networks (SANs). The configuration he outlined outperforms traditional models by a wide margin.

"Enterprise business solutions require the optimum combination of networking technologies, including SANs, LANs and WANs," said Yoshida. "SANs are only part of a larger network paradigm Hitachi Data Systems calls the Freedom Data Network. This combines the benefits of server and storage networks and provides six to 10 times the performance of traditional Internet protocol LAN configurations."

"With the growing flood of data arriving at subsystem controllers, the shared-bus architecture used in most current storage subsystems will inevitably become a performance bottleneck. A strategic way to meet the continuing demand for scalability is to deploy a network of internal switches that direct the data through many possible paths on its way from the controller to the disk drives," said Yoshida.

As very large-capacity disk drives come to market for future generations of storage subsystems, these disk drives themselves may become bottlenecks to system performance. "Adopting dual-ported Fibre Channel interface technology is the way to get faster back-end performance out of systems using the large disk drives," he said.

Yoshida also commented on the Intel-led CPU-to-network connection standards initiative, Infiniband. Infiniband standards, which are now being defined, bring the concept of switching into the processors to replace the shared peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus. Products reflecting these standards will not be available for several years.

"The direction is clearly toward switching for scalability," said Yoshida, "with switching for scalability being driven down from networks, to SANs, to internal controllers and processors. Do you care to guess who will be the first to provide a switched storage controller?"

Yoshida closed by stating that no matter who eventually develops the switched storage controller, Hitachi Data Systems Freedom Data Networks and Freedom Storage Products already lead the market in meeting the scalability and availability needs of today's large data networks that support e-commerce. Hitachi Data Systems will introduce its latest high availability storage product in late Q2 2000.

Committed to helping customers exploit the value of information technology for success in the Internet economy, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), is a leading provider of business solutions for the world's most information-intensive corporations. For further information on Hitachi Data Systems, access www.hds.com.

Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1998 (ended March 31, 1999) consolidated sales of 7,977 billion yen ($65.9 billion(1)). The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd., visit Hitachi's Web site at http://www.hitachi.co.jp.

(1) At an exchange rate of 121 yen to the dollar.