Hitachi Ltd’s Santa Clara, California-based Hitachi Data Systems Corp has seen the fruition of its 1994 alliance with IBM Corp (CI No 2,421) enhancing its open systems offer with the worldwide launch of the massively parallel SR4300, based on IBM’s RS/6000 SP2 architecture. The company, best known for its IBMulators, plans to add the scalable parallel processing capability to its Osiris mainframe open systems extension. It is hoping to jump on the data mining-data warehousing bandwaggon with Unix-networked parallel servers, which it says are ideally suited to complex query applications on large data sets, as well as transaction processing. Announced in Japan in July, the SR4300 system clusters processors and uses the IBM high speed switch to optimise parallel processing; it is scalable up to 512 nodes and Hitachi reckons it does not come into its own until it is configured with several nodes at from $350,000. New middleware and storage products include OpenTP1 transaction processing monitor, and Transbatch, transactional batch processing support enabling large data files to be split between nodes for processing. The company has also announced its 5700 RAID storage subsystem which it says increases performance and data integrity for the SR4300.