News

posted on 04 March 2008 15:29

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has launched three new network-attached storage products.

The three models are in HDS' Essential NAS Platform product line (HENP). They are announced on the same day that the Hitachi High-performance NAS Platform (HNAS) is upgraded to BlueArc's new Titan 3000 NAS product.

In a positioning sense the HENP products fit underneath the HNAS one and are targeted at remote and branch offices needing to be linked to a central site, and at small enterprises and the mid-market.

There are three HENP products: 1100; 1300; and 1500, each being fitted with more memory and offering greater performance. They can consolidate up to 512TB of file data in a 2-node, active-active, cluster offering either NFS or CIFS file access protocols.

The products are avalailable either as self-contained NAS products (filers) or as NAS gateways with a storage array behind them.

The gateway versions support either HDS AMS (Adaptable Modular Storage) mid-range modular storage arrays or HDS' high-end USP (Universal Storage Platform) V series.

The filer versions are bundled with an AMS storage array. The systems are pre-configured and can be installed in minutes, according to HDS, because of its NAS Wizard facility.

HDS' HiCommand management software supports these new products. The products have True Copy support and also ShadowImage support. An IP replication facility is needed for customers whose budget won't permit purchase of TrueCopy.

These new HENP products support more users than previous HDS NAS products apart from the HNAS ones.

Eric A. Vanderburg, a network operations manager for a customer called JurInnov, said: "As a service provider that serves both IT and legal departments, we needed an efficient solution to consolidate our file-base infrastructure that would scale to support over a billion files and hundreds of terabytes. We looked at NAS offerings from Hitachi and NetApp and it was clear that the new Hitachi Essential NAS Platform best fit our requirements for high availability and scalability. Implementing the platform allowed us to consolidate our file-based infrastructure saving us both capital and operational costs."

Andy Williams, an HDS EMEA NAS manager, said that the HENP products' pricing would be very competitive with the NetApp FAS3000 products and will offer better price/performance. He also offered this thought: "We're coming of age in the NAS arena (and) we want to be a major player in the file services area."