Christophe's Corner

Last year, 2009, was a great year for midrange storage at Hitachi.  In a down economy we grew our midrange revenues and we now have hundreds of petabytes of Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 systems installed by our customers.

Clearly customers are finding the AMS 2000 is meeting their needs.  “We’ve been nothing but impressed with our Adaptable Modular Storage 2000: the reliability, great performance, ease of use and operational savings are bar none when it comes to modular systems”, says Matthew Stroh of Industrial Electric Wire and Cable.  Matthew goes on to say, ”With Hitachi, we’ve gained brand new capabilities and nondisruptive data protection that allow us to manage rapid business growth and deliver a broader, deeper set of services to customers.”

Today we are announcing several important new features that will enable us to continue our momentum by focusing on our customer’s desire to save money through greater consolidation.  Attaching more servers to a single storage system and putting more terabytes on a floor tile with high density storage saves customers the expenses of buying, managing, powering and maintaining their storage as well as their data center facility charges.  Indeed some customers are unable to add new racks to their data center without taking out something else.

The latest AMS 2000 enhancements include a SAS disk option for our high density expansion tray and host port expansion slots for the AMS 2100 and 2300 controllers.  Customers now have a choice of SAS and SATA disks for tiered storage solutions in dense package giving them even more flexibility.  The host port expansion slots allow customers to either add more fibre channel host ports or to combine fibre channel and iSCSI host port on the same system.

“No one out there is doing what we’re doing so we want to have the maximum amount of flexibility, the maximum amount of density and capacity from our storage solution,” says Joshua Terry, director of systems engineering at Pixorial.  From a benefits perspective, Terry anticipates that Pixorial is well equipped to stay ahead of its current growth and to strategically manage future expansion. “We wanted to maximize footprint cost efficiency and performance. Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2500 with high-density expansion trays and the high-performance NAS cluster will help decrease overall costs per gigabyte per square foot,” he explains.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.