Hitachi launch 'fastest midrange storage' box

Hitachi Data Systems on Monday launched what it claims is the fastest midrange storage device on the market.

The Hitachi TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage model AMS1000 is a midrange storage platform with a cache bandwidth of 13GBps, and a maximum disk capacity of 208TB, said Hitachi. It uses a combination of high-speed Fibre Channel drives and cheaper SATA drives — running time-critical application on the Fibre Channel drives and archiving data on the SATA drives.

"The AMS1000 has got some high-level bells and whistles," claimed Jonathan Grantham, Hitachi Data Systems sales director for UK and Ireland. "We have the fastest performance box in terms of straight I/O rate compared with HP, EMC, and IBM."

"Look at the cache bandwidth of 13GBps — that's 10 times greater than the competition," Grantham added.

Cache bandwidth is the data transfer rate between the disk drive and the storage management unit. Hitachi claims that having a higher cache bandwidth means administrators can run more applications and queries, and make more inputs to the management unit in a shorter period of time.

Hitachi says this improves overall storage performance and efficiency, because information is no longer queued waiting for available bandwidth.

The cache on the AMS1000 can also be partitioned, allowing customers to "slice [it] up" based on the business needs of the application.

"Say an SAP application is absolutely critical — it may have 20 percent of the performance, but businesses can give it 60 percent of the cache," said Grantham.

The maximum cache capacity is 16GB, which Hitachi claims is twice as much capacity as its nearest competitor.

Grantham could not give an exact price for the device as various different configurations are available, but said that the base system for the AMS1000 would cost "under $80,000 (£46,000) — and an average configuration would be $115,000 to $130,000."

"We are confident that we are competitively priced," said Grantham. "We are the only storage company that designs, manufactures, and sends devices to customers. The competition end up buying from us."