Hitachi sets its eyes on the global SMB market

NEW DELHI: Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, has announced moves that will enable its rapid expansion into the global SMB markets. The company has launched channel-only storage solutions targeting fast-growing Windows-based SMB markets with SAN starter solutions based on new Thunder 9520V Workgroup Modular Storage.

These moves, backed by a significant investment by Hitachi in China and other key Asian and Eastern European markets, include channel-optimized starter solutions for SAN-based consolidation and data backup built on the new Hitachi Thunder 9520V Workgroup Modular Storage system.

The offerings, which will focus on the Microsoft Windows 2003 Server platform market, will be sold by Hitachi TrueNorth Channel partners around the globe-including Lenovo and Acer in Asia and Gateway in the Americas; and channel partners MAXDATA in Europe, and Bell Microproducts in North America.

"Customers in smaller businesses are facing many of the same problems as the big enterprises--complex environments, high people costs due to fragmented management tools, valuable data that is poorly protected, growth that is difficult to accommodate, less than optimal performance, and solutions that are expensive and difficult to implement",said Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida.

"Until today, these companies had to settle for marginal storage

products with questionable reliability. The Thunder 9520V enables our Channel partners to deliver a simple, reliable, easy to install and cost effective solution that addresses problems SMBs have to tackle with limited resources",he added.

The Thunder 9520V delivers 4.2 GB per second of cached bandwidth. It also supports Hi-Track 24/7 "call home" technology to help diagnose and resolve issues before they become problems, plus fully redundant components that can be replaced without downtime.