Hitachi Data Systems Ltd has now announced its long-awaited mainframe disk array subsystem, though beaten to the punch by Comparex Informationssysteme GmbH which announced the device as the Tetragon 2000 first (CI No 2,597). Hitachi calls it the 7700 Array Subsystem and says that it will eventually have larger capacity disk drives and SCS interface so that it can link to Unix systems. Other than that the system’s details are the same as those described by Comparex: RAID Level Five groups arranged in seven disk drives holding 22.7GB of data, rising to a possible 724Gb and availability in the third quarter this year. Hitachi has also announced a range of automated tape libraries, the Media Manager series, that are described by the company as high performance, fault-tolerant and system managed. The first products available are the 7430 and 7450 Media Managers that support Hitachi’s existing 7400 Tape Product Family and the Pathfinder Family of storage products. There are seven models of the 7450, ranging from the smallest with 2,103 cartridges to the largest with 8,751, rising in increments of 1,100 cartridges. The 7450 will support up to eight control units and 32 tape transports. The company says that dual robot arms enable 400 cartridge exchanges an hour which Hitachi says is the highest performance on any robotic system. Fault tolerance is achieved by duplicating each critical component, including the robots. The 7430 is described as the entry-level, small to medium capacity library with a footprint of just over nine square feet up to 55 square feet depending on the model. It also has seven models starting at a 316 cartridge library rising to a 3,016 one, in increments of 400 cartridges. These models can support up to eight transports and can perform 200 cartridge exchanges in an hour. The 7450 will be available in the third quarter and the 7430 in the fourth of this year, the Hitachi Ltd-Electronic Data Systems Corp joint venture says.
