Hitachi Ultrastar Solid State Drives Power HP 3PAR Storage Arrays

Hitachi may have been bought by Western Digital, but this only means it is every bit as active as ever, its most recent move consisting of getting its latest SSD series not just launched, but also adopted by HP enterprise systems.

The HP 3PAR systems are efficient and versatile virtual and cloud data centers that have the advantages of scalability, secure multi-tenancy and autonomic management, among other things.

It is this line of machines that will now be served by Hitachi's 3.5-inch Fibre Channel Ultrastar solid state drives.

This newest line of SSDs has the 3.5-inch form factor, as opposed to most SSDs which are of the 2.5-inch variety.

Constructed out of SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips, they are also shipping as part of HP T-Class and the new P10000 V-Class storage systems.

"Most data centers today rely on storage architectures built for the business demands of 20 years ago, not for the scale and unpredictability of today's virtualized environments," said Peter Slocum, vice president of Engineering, 3PAR, HP.

"Hitachi's new Ultrastar solid state drives for HP 3PAR storage systems deliver the increased reliability, performance, data protection as well as power loss management capabilities that customers demand in mission critical virtualization and cloud data center applications."

The Ultrastar SSD400S SLC SSDs have read and write speeds of 516 MB/s and 458 MB/s, respectively, over the SAS 6 Gbps interface.

The 4Gb/s FC connection is also supported, though the transfer rates are limited to 390 MB/s and 340 MB/s, respectively.

Furthermore, Hitachi cites 41,000 read and 21,000 write IOPS performance, leading to high productivity and operational efficiency.

“Hitachi understands tiered storage needs – from controllers and firmware, to BIOS and operating systems – as well as the importance of delivering the highest data integrity, cost-efficiency and easy system integration,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of Product Marketing at Hitachi GST.

“We are gratified that HP has chosen to qualify our SSDs for their storage arrays. Other customer feedback has been similarly positive, continuing Hitachi’s legacy of delivering quality products to the market that are fine-tuned to meet the changing needs of the enterprise datacenter and the cloud.”