MUMBAI: Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has
announced the general availability of FIbre CONnection (FICON) for the Hitachi
Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 Series. FICON, as a replacement for the current
ESCON connectivity, greatly improves data transfer rates, requires fewer channel
connections, and supports greater distances between Lightning 9900 storage
systems and z/OS or S/390 mainframes.
As a result, users and storage administrators benefit from faster data
access, higher transaction rates, higher speed data movement between mainframe
servers and storage devices, simplified infrastructure management, and more
geographically dispersed data centers for optimal business continuity.
FICON offers the advantages of Fiber Channel and storage area networking to
customers using the Lightning 9900 storage systems in z/OS and S/390
environments. FICON delivers up to 100MB per second data transfer rates, expands
the number of unit addresses per channel to 16,000 and increases the maximum
distance to 10km, or 100km with extenders. The Lightning 9900 systems combined
with FICON connectivity can consolidate the industry's highest storage capacity
per controller.
Hitachi Data Systems Professional Services is offering a set of services to
help customers take full advantage of FICON. These services include evaluation
of their existing fiber infrastructure with a view to protecting their existing
investment and migration to the FICON high-bandwidth infrastructure. Hitachi
Data Systems can provide the product, software and services for a complete
implementation.
In addition to FICON, Hitachi Data Systems offer other types of support for
S/390 customers, including Hitachi Parallel Access Volume/Multiple Allegiance,
Hitachi TrueCopy, Hitachi ShadowImage, and NanoCopy software to enable copying,
back up and disaster recovery capabilities based on the Lightning 9900 Series.