BANGALORE, INDIA: Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, has announced that it has "established a new dimension for midrange storage performance and scalability" with the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage, model AMS1000, in Microsoft Exchange Server Environments. 

Through the Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP), which Microsoft designed to facilitate third-party storage testing and solution publishing for Exchange Server, Hitachi Data Systems demonstrated that the AMS1000 supports more than 25,000 concurrent Exchange 2007 users, making the Hitachi AMS1000 an ideal storage platform for Microsoft Exchange environments.

"The Microsoft ESRP program is a valuable resource for storage customers planning their Exchange Server 2007 deployments," said Jon Orton, product manager at Microsoft Corp.  "We're pleased to have Hitachi Data Systems participating in the program.

Publishing an ESRP solution helps Hitachi Data Systems validate the capabilities of the AMS1000 midrange storage system for Exchange Server 2007."

The Hitachi AMS1000, first introduced in April 2006, enables IT organizations to optimize the performance of and provide secure data access to vital business applications, such as e-mail, ERP, CRM, and databases. The Hitachi AMS1000 can be intelligently configured to match an application’s performance requirements, such as for high-performance computing environments, rich media applications, automotive and seismic modeling applications, and online transaction processing (OLTP)—enabling a concurrent mix of multiple partitioned workloads with up to 32 secure logical cache partitions—optimizing cache performance for each individual application. 

The Hitachi AMS1000 also delivers non-disruptive “on-the-fly” data movement across multiple tiers of storage, enterprise-class RAID-6 data protection, and sophisticated multi-protocol support for iSCSI, NAS, and Fibre Channel SAN, embedded in a single system. The Hitachi AMS1000 also offers 4 Gigabit per second Fibre Channel SAN connectivity, enhancing the performance of applications such as video-on-demand and medical imaging.

"Application performance is one of the most important aspects of making a storage decision," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.  "For many end- users it is essential that a single storage system be able to provide high performance for a number of different applications and be able to scale to a high number of concurrent accesses.  The Hitachi AMS1000 achieves this through an intelligent combination of hardware and software-based technology that enables this level of performance.  This latest benchmark is impressive and even more so because it is based on real world application data and not just synthetic workloads."

“With today’s organizations having as many as 500,000 Exchange users, the need for a robust, high availability storage solution has never been greater,” said Peter Smails, senior director, Global Product Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems.

“Hitachi Data Systems and Microsoft solutions offer midrange storage customers the industry's highest levels of availability, performance and scalability, while also easing growth, decreasing backup times and improving administration of their Exchange Server environments.”

Hitachi Services Oriented Storage Solutions provide unmatched scalability by encompassing very small to very large storage based on an application’s business needs. Utilizing the external virtualization services of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ V, customers can incorporate the midrange Hitachi AMS and WMS systems, integrated under the same storage management umbrella, benefiting from the same common storage services. The Hitachi AMS and WMS systems complement the Universal Storage Platform V as tiered or archive storage, especially when configured with SATA disk for lower costs; yet another example of Hitachi delivering unmatched cost-effectiveness and scalability to customers.