Hatachi Boosts Mid Market Storage Options

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Hitachi Data Systems today announced enhancements to its Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 family to increase performance and density, as well as improved performance, reliability, and security.

Hitachi (NYSE: HIT) is a giant in Japanese enterprise tech but isn’t widely known in the U.S. The company has been on an initiative to gain ground in the U.S., both in storage systems as well as bladed servers.

“We introduced the AMS 2000 line back in October and had some very good success to date,” Mark Adams, senior product marketing manager for the AMS line at Hitachi, told InternetNews.com. “We’ve shipped a total capacity of over 60 petabytes in nine months with our AMS 2000 family and cracked a number of institutions that have complex requirements from their storage.”

The Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 comes in three models, and most of the changes are in the 2500 model, at the high end of the lineup. These devices are aimed at the mid-range market as well as the enterprise.

For starters, storage capacity has more than doubled with a new High Density Storage Expansion Tray that supports up to 48 3.5-inch drives in a 4U rack. The Hitachi cabinet can hold up to ten daisy-chained racks for a total of 480TB of storage.

Storage needs provisioning, which Hitachi had already announced as on track for the second half of the year. The Dynamic Provisioning for AMS 2000 brings thin provisioning to the hardware, helping improve efficiency of storage allocation. Many apps allocate capacity and then only use 20 to 25 percent of it, Adams said.

Hitachi is reselling Brocade’s Fibre Channel switches to go with the storage systems that offer 2x the normal performance, or 8gbits per second of throughput. These are for the AMS 2300 and 2500 only and will be available in the second half of this year.

In addition to the regular storage systems, Hitachi is offering an Adaptable Modular Storage 2500DC edition specifically designed for the telco central offices. It will be NEBS and ETSI compliant, support the -48 volt direct current power supplies of a telco and have all the certifications telcos require, such as resilience to earthquakes.

Finally, Hitachi has added external authentication support, so customers can log on from anywhere in the world, not just at the physical unit, to perform administrative tasks. It also supports management of multiple nodes scattered around the world from a single console.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.