Hitachi/Gateway GS2040, Storage Solution for SMB Market

Since 2006, Acer Group and Hitachi Data Systems Corp. have worked together to supply co-branded storage solutions to the SMB market. Gateway, Inc. as Acer Group’s brand dedicated to the professional market, is announcing its role in this cooperation. This agreement renews the partnership and together, the brands will co-develop products that can provide a clear advantage to SMBs looking for reliability, performance and scalability.

Today Gateway presents the new storage GS2040, the first of a solution series dedicated to the SMB market and branded under the Hitachi/Gateway name. The GS2040 will be marketed through the dedicated Gateway channel.

Companies today are faced with significant challenges from the growing deluge of data and complex procedures for dealing with backup and data protection. This issue can become extremely costly for smaller organisations, and with many storage solutions aimed purely at the enterprise market, SMBs can face considerable problems around acquiring cost-effective and reliable storage systems.

The Hitachi/Gateway GS2040 storage solution is the answer to these problems, offering high availability, performance, scalability and data protection functionality. Customised to meet SMB demands, the GS2040 is an easy-to-use, highly reliable, and cost-effective storage system for Microsoft Exchange Server, VMware, databases and other business applications.

The Hitachi/Gateway GS2040 storage solution provides small and medium business customers a range of benefits:

Simplified, Reliable, Integrated Storage

• 99.999 percent data availability
• Helps minimise disruption and risk with no single point of failure and mirrored cache with battery backup
• Helps improve administrative efficiencies with wizard-based configuration set-up and provisioning
• Reduces time spent on configuration with solution-ready platforms that are certified and tested with the leading business applications

Flexible, Scalable Business Growth

• The GS2040 can protect company investments and can meet the data storage growth requirements of any business with the ability to scale capacity to 120TB, performance to 400K IOPS and connectivity to 512 virtual server ports
• The GS2040 can expand as the business grows

Compliance and Data Protection

• RAID-6 ensures high availability and protection. RAID 6 allows for any two HDDs to fail without losing data and protects data integrity
• Hi-Track Monitor for 24/7 diagnostics keeps potential issues from becoming problems
• Within-system volume replication or incremental copies enable frequent backups
• Flexible sparing eliminates the need to copy back after a RAID group rebuild
• Audit logging tracks all system changes
• Hitachi Data Retention Utility software protects data from overwrites or erasures for long periods of time

Reduction of Management Costs

• Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing Controller automatically reduces controller bottlenecks; ideal for server virtualisation environments
• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software provides ‘virtual storage capacity’ to eliminate application service interruptions, reduce costs and simplify administration

"Today, companies of all sizes face the same challenges of managing explosive data growth, complex applications, legal compliance and security," commented Jean-Luc Cervera, General Manager, Small and Medium Channel EMEA, Hitachi Data Systems. "Through Gateway’s 100% indirect channel model, small and medium business customers will now be able to benefit from our high-end functionality storage which will strengthen our presence in the rapidly-developing SMB market. Together with Acer and Gateway, we can provide a unique end-user value proposition based on tailored solutions that better meet the customer demands for cost-effective performance, simplified management, and return on storage assets over time."

"Acer, Gateway and Hitachi Data Systems are ideal partners for the SMB storage market" – said Gianluca Degliesposti, Vice President Global Server Business Development, Acer Group. – "The combination of world-class storage solutions and channel supply program guarantees prompt feedback, customised configurations specialised sales support and provides a clear advantage for companies with IT infrastructure looking for reliability, performance and scalability."