The company cannot boast the same reach into the low end or midrange markets as HP or IBM, let alone the EMC-Dell combination. But it can’t ignore the booming midrange sector and when it launched its new hardware yesterday, it promised that it is channel-optimized.
We have listened to the business requirements of our valued channel partners around the globe, said Rachel Young, market vice president for Hitachi’s subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems. According to HDS, the new devices offer more functionality but are cheaper and easier to install and finance than their predecessors.
The new mid-range devices are called the Workgroup Modular Storage and Adaptable Modular Storage series. Both are aimed at the SMB market, and are replacements for Hitachi’s Thunder 9520 and 9530 arrays. In the same way that it abandoned the Lightning name when it launched its high-end TagmaStore, Hitachi is now dumping the Thunder name.
Based on conventional twin and single-controller architecture with non-shared cache, the AMS and WMS boxes introduce features such as support for RAID 6, which is becoming attractive because of the increasing use of ATA disk. RAID 6 can survive multiple drive failures, and can rebuild drives more quickly than other RAID variants, Hitachi said.
Even though the cache on the AMS and WMS boxes is not shared, it can be partitioned, and the write-mirroring can be switched off within partitions, to improve performance for no-OLTP data streaming applications. The boxes also add the ability to match cache segments to raid parity striping to improve performance. Hitachi also talked up its Tiered Storage Manager software, which moves data automatically between tiers of Hitachi TagmaStore, AMS, and WMS boxes.
Although HP and Sun are OEMing the NSC55 device that Hitachi also unveiled yesterday (see separate story), they would not be OEMing the AMS or WMS boxes. Hitachi said that although the Thunder 9520 and 9530 would no longer be sold, the company would continue to offer the Thunder 9585.
