Hitachi's OpenSAN alliance

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) will expand its OpenSAN offerings, by adding Crossroads Systems and McDATA Corporation connectivity options to its Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions.

The OpenSAN Alliance Program, launched by HDS in April last year, aims to provide comprehensive open SAN solutions with integrated SAN technology. The initiative already counts Ancor Communications, Emulex, Gadzoox Networks and JNI among its members, all of whom aim to work together to give channel partners greater flexibility and choice in developing SAN solutions.

OpenSAN provides four SAN components: storage systems, interconnect devices, host bus adapters and central management software. The program also provides customers with interoperability testing and support.

As part of the alliance, HDS will resell Crossroads' 4200 Fibre Channel-to-SCSI router, which provides bi-directional connectivity for data transfer between a Fibre Channel SAN and legacy SCSI devices.

It will also resell McDATA's ED-5000 Enterprise Fibre Channel Director, a 32 port director that provides dynamic switching to maintain reliability and performance.

HDS will also individually update its SAN-enabled storage subsystem, the Freedom Storage 7700E, to improve the solution's perfomance across computing environments.

OPENING STORAGE OPTIONS

The product now supports Red Hat Linux 6.X, Windows 2000 and Novell NetWare 5.0 operating systems, in addition to its existing support for Windows NT, earlier NetWare versions, several UNIX-based platforms and OS/390 servers.

The 7700E has also undergone other improvements, including Hitachi's Open Asynchronous Remote Copy function which allows users to move large amounts of data over any distance from one 7700E to another with complete data integrity and little impact on performance.

This feature may be useful for disaster recovery, data vaulting or business intelligence applications.

The 7700E can now also support new generation high-speed disk drives with capacities of 18GB and 47GB, giving the solution greater data retrieval rates and increasing its total capacity to up to 11TB. Hitachi intends to add a 73GB drive option to this offering, which will give the 7700E a maximum capacity of 11TB.