The box starts at under $5,000, and tops out at 12 SAS or SATA 3.5in disk drives, which Hitachi said gives a maximum usable capacity of 7TB with its current biggest 750GB drives.
Called the Simple Modular Storage 100, the 2U rack-mounted or free-standing device is the first of a family of in-house designed Hitachi boxes, that are cheaper than its previous entry-level device, the SATA-powered WMS 100, which starts at around $10,000.
Hitachi said it is aiming at customers with as few as three or four servers that might not yet have installed any direct-attached storage, let alone a storage network.
Hence Hitachi’s claim that the box features an intuitive GUI, and is self-healing. New or replacement drives slotted into the box will be added to a RAID group automatically, with no manual configuration needed. A three-year warranty is standard for the device, which can also be managed remotely for use in corporate branch offices.
The iSCSI model 100 will be followed by a Fibre Channel version in March.
When you talk about SMB customers, some are getting surprisingly sophisticated, and re starting to see some with SAP installations, which are critical applications for them, said Kevin Sampson, director of product marketing at Hitachi. For critical database applications, Sampson said he would probably recommend Fibre Channel over iSCSI, because of its better performance.
