Hitachi Unveils New Milestones 

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) today unveiled new milestones to help organizations extract meaningful insights from information that will lead to innovation and inspire global action. Today's advancements in flash technology, advanced x86 servers and support for OpenStack are the next step in the overarching mission of the Hitachi and HDS Global Office of Technology and Planning (Global OTP) to leverage the unique engineering and R&D talents of both organizations to deliver proven solutions that address customer challenges.

Key deliverables announced today include significant new flash storage developments that build on the unique HDS flash strategy, an extension of the HDS server and converged solutions offerings, and the company's election to Gold Membership of the OpenStack Foundation.

Ushering in a New Era of Flash Storage

As part of a multi-phased strategy first announced in August 2012, to incorporate innovative and patented Hitachi flash technology across the HDS storage portfolio, the companies are unveiling developments that extend their leadership in the flash storage space. These advancements will ease flash deployment, improve return on flash investments, and lower operating expenses compared to alternative solutions or single-purpose flash storage products. They include:

Expansion of unique Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage options:

• Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) 150 now supports Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage modules, bringing enterprise-class flash to the midrange storage market.
• NEW 3.2TB Hitachi Accelerated Flash modules, currently supported within Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM) and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).

Continued flash storage performance leadership:

• Availability of flash optimization software for HUS VM, delivering extreme all flash array performance of greater than 1,000,000 IOPS at sub-millisecond response times in a single system. (100% random read, 4K IO)
• Demonstrable performance superiority as illustrated by the recently released results of HUS VM all-flash and Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) configurations in the SPECsfs2008 NFS benchmark. The 2-node configuration set the best-ever published response time of 0.59 milliseconds. The 4-node HNAS system delivered higher NFS operations per second than a comparable all solid-state EMC VNX8000, despite having half as many file servers and 1/8th as many solid-state devices.

The Global OTP will continue to expand on this roadmap and Hitachi leadership in the flash storage market, which already includes over 60 patents granted or pending for Hitachi flash devices and software modifications. Further, the Global OTP will foster expansion of HDS and Hitachi research and development activity in flash storage and management. HDS and Hitachi will introduce significant advancements in flash management, protection and tiering, which will span compute and storage environments.

Hitachi Servers and Converged Solutions 

In addition to delivering innovations in flash technology, Hitachi is leveraging a 50-year continuous history of mainframe and server technology development to expand its leadership in server products and converged solutions based on the Intel Xeon processor. With a focus on datacenter requirements and a close engineering relationship with Intel, Hitachi has created x86-based servers with higher reliability, greater manageability and better performance than typical "commodity" designs, which provides customers with real advantages and more compelling converged solutions.

Today's announcement includes the availability of:

• New Hitachi High Performance Blades for Hitachi Compute Blade 500 and Compute Blade 2000 Servers: These new server blades protect customer investment and allow them to incrementally add the latest technologies, based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600v2 "Ivy Bridge" processor family. The new blades perform better and reduce power consumption while retaining unique, innovative Hitachi features, such as hardware-embedded logical partitioning (LPARs) and automated cold-standby failover.
• PCI Expansion Blade for CB500: This new IO expansion blade allows CB500 users to combine existing integrated, shared network switches with dedicated PCIe-based host bus adapters (HBA) and cards, such as nVidia GRID K2 GPUs for shared virtual desktops (VDI) and server-based flash, which is typically used for acceleration of applications, such as Oracle database and SAP HANA.

OpenStack for the Private Cloud and the Open Software-Defined Data Center

In an effort to realize an open approach to the software-defined data center (SDDC), the Global OTP is proud to announce Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems have expanded their support of the OpenStack Foundation. Through a gold-level sponsorship, HDS and Hitachi intend to provide customers with the greatest flexibility and options to build fully integrated, programmatically controllable, scalable and cost-effective private cloud infrastructures that complement the OpenStack partner ecosystem. This expanded partnership reflects the long-standing Hitachi commitment to Open Source that ultimately enables and empowers IT organizations to drive innovation and immediate value within their environments.