History 2000: Up to 27TB on Same HDS 9900 and HP XP512

Hitachi Data Systems, a 100% subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., has given up mainframe computers, but not mainframe storage devices, where historically it has always maintained a presence, at one time with IBM-compatible disk drives.

In RAIDs, its initial offering is the Freedom 5800, a disk array for open systems that goes to 1TB.

Competing with IBM’s Shark, StorageTek’s Iceberg and EMC’s Symmetrix, the Freedom 7700E was intended for mainframes, but with the possibility of storing open system data as well. Thus far, the device has enjoyed remarkable success. Even if HDS lost one of its largest resellers, Comparex, which switched over to rival EMC, it recently won Hewlett-Packard, where it will replace Symmetrix with the SureStore E Disk Array XP256.

According to Olivier Des Moutis, GM, HDS France, 5,000 have sold throughout the world for a total of 3,500TB shipped, not counting the more than 1,000 orders placed by HP.

Unfortunately, none of this seems to have prevented overall sales at HDS from dipping, from roughly $2 billion to $1.6 billion from FY99 to FY00, ended last March.

“In the agreement we signed with HP, we had to loan them 150 people, or 35% of our WW sales force, for a year, which accounts for the decrease,” explained Des Moutis, “But that transaction ended last April.“

Recall that the agreement between the 2 companies provides that HDS will not figure in HP’s accounts, which means that they are, to some extent, competing with each other.

Designed in the long run to replace the 7700E, which dates back to 1995, comes the shiny new Lightning 9900, for OS/390, NT/2000, Novell NetWare, Linux and Unix environments, based on Hi-Star architecture especially designed for SANs. The company is emphasizing an innovative internal cache-switching technology that replaces the shared-bus architecture of current subsystems, enabling as high as 6.4GB/s internal bandwidth, according to marketing director Michel Alliel.

HDS further notes that is new architecture is capable of scaling capacity without diminishing performance. The 9900 accepts 32 front-end FC, Escon or ficon connections for servers, and just as many backend FC connections for the disk subsystems.

The RAID-5 disk arrays permit user capacities of 26.9TB (or 37TB of raw storage) or 17.7GB in RAID-0+1 on Hitachi’s 18, 43 or 73GB FC HDDs, based on 3-inch platters spinning at 10,000rpm.

Availability is immediate, except for the 73GB devices, which will not be proposed for the 4000.

HDS already has a customer for the 9900, in fact, Credit Suisse, a storage glutton, since it already has 58TB stored on disks connected to its IBM S/390 mainframes.

The new model will primarily be sold directly by HDS, rather than any of its current resellers.

The cost starts at around $600,000, going up to nearly $12 million. A 3TB configuration runs roughly $1.5 million.

Like many SAN suppliers, HDS is allied with a number of companies that furnish components for its overall architecture, including Ancor, Quantum/ATL, Brocade, CA, Cisco, Crossoads, Gadzoox, Emulex, JNI, McData, SAP, Tivoli and Veritas. The 9900 will be offered under the name XP512 by HP, whose line will ultimately include a single-cabinet model under the name XP48. SGI has also just signed a 3-year reseller agreement with HDS for the same disk arrays.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 150 on July 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.