Hitachi Ltd really seems to be eating IBM Corp’s top-end lunch with shameless gusto – and there’s not a thing IBM can do about it. The perception that the CMOS 390s would be fine for 80% of users, but useless for many of the top 20% with enormous daily time-dependent batch jobs turns out to be entirely correct, and where Hitachi had been expecting to ship perhaps 100 systems (500 processors in four-, six- or eight-way configurations) this year, Hitachi Data Systems in the US is now saying that the number of systems shipped worldwide by the year-end could go as high as 250 systems.
