Hitachi Lights Up Lightning 9900 System

The Lightning 9900 is the industry’s first high-end storage system to deploy 2 Gbps technology, increasing performance by as much as 40 percent over the earlier 1 Gbps technology, officials said. Shipping of the advanced capability will begin in October.

Launched in June 2000, the Lightning 9900 introduced the Hi-Star “internal switch” architecture that made it the highest performing storage system in the industry with an effective internal bandwidth of 6.4 Gigabytes per second, HDS officials said. The performance gain was obtained by eliminating the inherent bottlenecks experienced by widely used systems based on the long-established “shared bus” architecture.

The performance increases achieved with 2 Gbps connections are in addition to a substantial improvement to the Lightning 9900 made earlier this year. In February, Hitachi Data Systems made available advanced technology that boosts the Lightning’s performance by as much as 20 percent when used in configurations where a large number of servers feed data in parallel into the storage system. Users of large databases are among those who can accomplish substantially more work by taking advantage of this capability.

The introduction of 2Gbps Fibre Channel adapters will enable high-speed remote copy using Hitachi TrueCopy, initially for open systems and shortly thereafter for S/390(R) users. With this new capability, customers will be able to improve disaster recovery and backup/restore operations.