Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Systems has announced that its North American group companies will undergo a major reorganisation this autumn.

Hitachi Systems Security USA and Cumulus Systems will be combined to form a new Hitachi subsidiary, Hitachi Systems Trusted Cyber Management (Hitachi Systems TCM).

Cumulus Systems will be renamed Hitachi Systems TCM as of October 1, at which time it will acquire Hitachi Systems Security USA with a merger. Cumulus Systems Private Ltd., which is based in India, and Hitachi Systems Security, which is based in Canada, will likewise become subsidiaries of Hitachi Systems TCM.

Hitachi Systems states that Hitachi Systems TCM will be better suited to provide customers with more detailed threat intelligence, sophisticated performance analytics, and develop new services to give advance warning of cyber threats in advance of attacks.

This comes as a result of the combined skillsets of Cumulus Systems and Hitachi Systems Security, with the development experience and managed security capabilities of each respectively coming together to provide a more cohesive service across North America.

Once consolidated, Hitachi Systems TCM will also work closely with Hitachi Systems India, to help deliver managed digital ecosystems and quality security services in a market that Hitachi Systems has identified as a key strategic area for expansion.

Scott Wiebe, current CEO and CFO of Cumulus Systems, will become the CEO of the newly-formed Hitachi Systems TCM. Wiebe has worked for Cumulus Systems since 2006. Meanwhile, Hitachi Systems Security CEO Anthony Subero, who joined the firm in 1999, will serve as Hitachi Systems TCM COO.

“Cumulus Systems has continuously created value for its customers by building a world-class engineering team with a focus on performance analytics tools, software engineering, and professional services,” stated Wiebe.

“We have applied this value to Hitachi Systems Security over the past several years by providing security engineering services and security services operation. By combining the two entities into Hitachi Systems TCM, we will continue to capitalize on the convergence of technology, knowledge, and process, and we are looking forward to providing enhanced value to our customers in North America, Europe, India, and Japan.”

Western Digital today confirmed the acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST), boosting its already significant share of the storage market and giving it a stronger Hard Disk Drive (HDD) unit.

The deal sees Hitachi pocket $3.9 billion (2.5 billion) in cash, along with 25 million shares in Western Digital, valued at just under $1 billion. The shares equal 10 per cent of the company and gives Hitachi the right to appoint two of its own members to Western Digital's board of directors.

The completion of this acquisition is a truly momentous event in the 42-year history of our company

There were question marks as to whether the deal, first proposed in March 2011, would ever go through regulatory bodies had to see whether it was competitive to give Western Digital such a large portion of the HDD market and if it would push its main rival Seagate out of the business.

After a year of debate, the deal has finally received approval and Hitachi GST will run as a separate, but wholly-owned subsidiary, of Western Digital.

John Coyne, chief executive (CEO) of Western Digital, will take on the CEO role at Hitachi GST, whereas Steve Milligan, Hitachi GST's former CEO, will take on the role of president.

Both the chief operating officer (COO) and chief financial officer (CFO) roles will be kept by Western Digital staff.

"The completion of this acquisition is a truly momentous event in the 42-year history of our company," said Coyne.

"With ownership of two successful companies and the best talent available in the industry, we expect to accomplish great things as we build the new Western Digital to be the world's leading storage solutions provider with the industry's deepest technology capability, broadest product portfolio and best-in-class execution."

But what about Seagate? It had always been the larger of the two firms but will it continue to be competitive in the HDD market? Claus Egge, director of his own analyst firm, believes so.

"Seagate has been very strong for many years," he told IT Pro. "The fact that Western Digital has bought Hitachi GST and wanted to add enterprise drives to its portfolio won't [change] that.

"They have their own sales chains and have their markets. Both companies will continue."

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) has claimed to achieve an industry first this week with the launch of its Ultrastar SSD range.

The company said it was the first time single-level cell NAND flash based on 25nm technology had been made commercially available, bringing speedier throughput and better performance to enterprise storage arrays.

That Hitachi is now stating a five year life with considerable i/o hammering is good news

The Ultrastar SSD400S.B range comes in three capacities - 100GB, 200GB and 400GB - and uses 2.5 inch 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces to allow for fail-over to a second port.

Another added in resilience comes from Intel. The company worked closely on the SSDs with Hitachi to bring in what it called "endurance firmware" and power management features, enabling the SSDs to last much longer.

Hitachi claimed a 400GB SSD could handle up to 35PB of random writes during its lifetime, the equivalent of writing 19.2TB to the drive every day for five years.

Clive Longbottom, founder and principle analyst at Quocirca, said this element was much more important than being the first in the industry to use 25nm SLC NAND flash.

"Vendors have kept pretty quiet about how SSD technology has a limited life each memory bubble can only be written to for a reasonably limited number of times before it just gives in, and historically, this has been less than three years' use," he said.

"There are a lot of enterprises out there having gone for SSD who will find their tier zero storage systems falling off the edge of a cliff in the next year or so. That Hitachi is now stating a five year life with considerable i/o hammering is good news."

Security is also a headline feature of the Ultrastar portfolio, with the option to buy self-encrypting drives. An encryption key is built into the drive and can only be accessed by the customer.

If the key is deleted, all of the data becomes unreadable. Hitachi claimed these features enabled better performance by moving encryption away from the processor.

"Security is a growing concern among enterprise customers, especially those in financial services, e-commerce and online transaction processing," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi.

"With our new 25nm SLC SSDs, our enterprise customers now have the highest level of data protection in an SSD without compromising system performance, reliability and endurance."

Hitachi again claimed to beat its rivals with throughput speeds. The Ultrastar drives offer up to 536MBps read throughput and 502MBps write throughput, as well as up to 57,500 read and 25,500 sustained write IOPS. This, the firm claims, is 100 times faster than traditional hard drives.

The SSDs also offer low power consumption and, with less SSDs needed to achieve better performance than HDDs, Hitachi claimed the cost of IOPS per watt was also significantly reduced.

The Ultrastar SSD400S.B range has begun to ship already and Hitachi is in the process of working out OEM partnerships.

The European Commission has approved Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi's hard disk drive business.

The approval, under the European Union (EU) merger regulation and subject to conditions, clears US-based Western Digital to buy rival Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST), a subsidiary of Hitachi of Singapore recently renamed Viviti Technologies.

The approval is conditional upon the divestment of Western's production assets for 3.5in hard disk drives (HDD), including a production plant and the transfer of personnel and supply of HDD components.

The EC also said it cannot complete the Viviti acquisition until it has found a suitable purchaser for the divestment that must also be approved by the Commission.

Joaqun Almunia, European Commission vice president in charge of competition policy, said in a statement that the proposed divestiture would ensure that competition in the industry is fully restored before the merger is implemented.

"Hard disk drives are a key component of computers and other sophisticated electronic devices as they are used to store a growing bulk of data in the digital economy," he stated.

The commission said its decision was based on findings that there are separate worldwide markets for HDDs based on their form factor (3.5in or 2.5in) and different end uses, including in desktops, mobile and consumer electronics devices and enterprise business and mission-critical applications.

Without the divestment, it found the merged entity would only face competition in markets for 3.5in desktop HDDs and consumer electronics HDDs from the recently merged Seagate and Samsung, preventing customers from multi-source HDD purchases.

The transaction will reduce the number of competitors to three and in some markets to two, including the merged Western Digital/Viviti and Seagate/Samsung entities and Toshiba.

It also noted that Toshiba only recently entered the market for 3.5in business critical HDDs, but was uncertain whether it could replace competitive pressure presently exerted by Viviti.

Today's approval comes seven months after Western Digital announced its intention to buy HGST. The commission said it also took the Seagate/Samsung merger in the same sector into account, as it received its notification one day earlier than the HGST deal and approved it on 19 October.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has gobbled up network storage supplier BlueArc, following a five-year OEM partnership between the two.

BlueArc produces network attached storage (NAS) devices, which have become increasingly popular amongst smaller-sized businesses.

Hitachi said a key reason for the acquisition was a desire to be a key player in the big data market. The vendor wants to help companies transform their traditional data centres into "information centres," in which it will be easy to "seamlessly store and access all data, content and information."

Simply put, Hitachi is pointing its crosshairs at the private cloud market.

"Over the past five years, BlueArc has been an integral part of our strategy to help customers store and manage unstructured data of all types, such as video, email, medical imaging, scientific data and more," said Jack Domme, chief executive (CEO) of HDS.

"Our combined efforts will deliver cost-effective infrastructure cloud and content cloud solutions that customers can take advantage of as they look to further transform their data centres."

Mike Gustafson, CEO of BlueArc, said the deal was a win-win for the companies and their customers alike.

"We view this as a critical time in information technology, where we will help customers assess and map their business priorities and deliver information services as we work collectively to continue to define next generation information centres amidst the expanding world of file and content," Gustafson added.

Hitachi did not disclose the terms of the deal but Japan's Asahi newspaper claimed it was worth between $500 and $600 million, according to Reuters.

Acer has had a relationship with Hitachi Data Systems going back a number of years and, as part of its onslaught on the SMB network storage market, has extended this to its Gateway business division. With this agreement, Gateway is marketing Hitachi's lower-end storage arrays under its own brand leaving the Japanese giant free to concentrate on the enterprise storage market.

Gateway makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it's in partnership with Hitachi.

In this exclusive review we take a look at the GS2040, the entry-level model in this family of three products. Gateway makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it's in partnership with Hitachi. The well-built 4U chassis has room for fifteen hot-swap carriers and supports mixes of SAS and SATA drives, plus Gateway offers 200GB SSDs. At present, the GS2040 only supports up to 2TB SATA2 drives and is not yet certified for 3TB models.

However, if you go for a full house of 2TB SATA drives, capacity can be pushed to 30TB. The appliance can also be expanded to a maximum of 90 drives using extra shelves so storage can be increased to a very respectable 180TB.

The GS2040 has plenty of fault tolerance as the chassis comes, as standard, with two redundant hot-plug power supplies and a pair of hot-plug fan modules. The price includes two controllers which run in active/active mode and they each incorporate 2GB of battery protected cache memory mirrored across both of them.

The rear of the Gateway GS2040.

The controllers also have pair of SAS ports so extra expansion shelves can be connected via fault tolerant links. You have a choice of data ports as the GS2040 can support either 4/8Gbit/s FC SANs or IP SANs. Our review unit was supplied with dual Gigabit iSCSI data ports on each controller.

Installation is handled by the Storage Navigator Modular 2 (SNM2) software which is designed to manage multiple arrays from a central console. It runs as a group of web services on your chosen host system which can be accessed either locally or from another remote system.

A quick start wizard steps through configuring the four iSCSI data ports and choosing spare drives to cover any failures.

Your next task is to create RAID groups where you choose your drives and decide on an array type which can range from a simple mirror to dual drive redundant RAID 6. The process is very simple as you choose either SAS or SATA drive types, pick an array and decide how many drives are to be used in it.

Target creation is a swift process as you create a logical unit, decide on its size in MB, GB, TB or blocks and choose a LUN (logical unit number). You can assign it to a specific data port and either use an existing iSCSI target or create a new one. Access security is good as it can be enabled on individual data ports to stop more than one host logging in to an iSCSI target and you can implement CHAP authentication as well.

The GS2040 returned some good results in our performance tests. Starting with a Dell PowerEdge R515 running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit, we saw the Iometer utility report high raw read and write throughputs of 110MB/s and 100MB/s.

We then connected a Broadberry dual Xeon X5560 rack server to a data port on the second controller and logged it into a dedicated iSCSI target. With Iometer running on both systems we saw a cumulative raw read throughput of 220MB/s showing no contention for resources was occurring.

All critical hardware components are monitored and you can be alerted by email of any failures.

Thin provisioning isn't included as standard - Gateway offers Hitachi's Dynamic Provisioning (DP) software as an option. This allows volumes to be created that use a small amount of physical space but appear much larger to host systems.

DP is activated by entering a license in the management console and it requires special pools to be created. These are made available to all thinly provisioned volumes and as they get used, more storage from the pool is made available to them.

It's disappointing that snapshots for point-in-time copies aren't included and are another optional purchase. HP's StorageWorks P2000 G3 looks better value as prices are in the same ball park but it comes with a 64 snapshot license as standard. Gateway's Volume Backup is also an optional extra, but HP includes its volume cloning feature as standard.

Although the GS2040 is essentially a rebadged Hitachi Data Systems appliance, this isn't an issue as it's very well built and provides plenty of storage features. With prices for a diskless appliance starting at around 7,500 it's good value as long as you don't need too many of the optional extras which will push costs up significantly.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

SMBs won’t go far wrong with Gateway’s GS2040 as this appliance is built on a firm foundation, has a good range of network storage features, a high expansion potential and hardware redundancy too. It's also very easy to install and manage. However, we recommend checking out HP’s StorageWorks P2000 G3 arrays first as they cost around the same, are 10-Gigabit ready and provide many backup features as standard rather than as options.

Chassis: 4U rack chassis Storage: 10 x 300GB 15K SAS, 4 x 1TB SATA in hot-swap carriers Power: 2 x redundant hot-plug power supplies Two controllers each with the following: Memory: 2GB with BBU RAID support: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6 Data ports: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Management: Gigabit Ethernet Other ports: 2 x 6Gbit/s SAS expansion Management: Hitachi SNM2 software

The European Union's Competition Commission is looking into prospective deals from two of the world's leading hard disk companies to ensure all is fair in mergers and storage.

The regulator is examining Seagate's planned take-over of Samsung's HDD division, alongside Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi's storage arm, to ensure the overall market won't suffer as a result.

Joaqun Almunia, the Commission's vice president in charge of competition policy, said: "Hard drives are the backbone of the digital economy. The sector has already experienced significant consolidation and the proposed acquisitions will further reduce competition."

"The Commission will carefully examine if effective competition is preserved and innovation encouraged."

The sticking point for the Commission is how much it would cut down competition between vendors. A merger of Seagate and Samsung would increase the former's leading position, leaving only Western Digital and Hitachi to compete. If those two merged as well, they would then take over the market and only face competition from the Seagate/Samsung venture and Toshiba.

"This could impact negatively on customers' ability to obtain competitive prices for the product [and] the merger could also reduce the manufacturers' incentives to innovate in the market," said an EU statement.

The investigation will not be conducted overnight though, with the Commission having 90 working days to make a final decision making the deadline 10 October.

As a result, Western Digital has now re-jigged its date for the completion of its acquisition, putting its estimates back to the fourth calendar quarter of this year.

"The company is co-operating fully with the EC in the Phase II review [and] the company indicated that it is proceeding, on plan, with its integration-planning activities associated with the proposed acquisition," read a statement from Western Digital, showing it still believed the Hitachi deal would go ahead.

IT PRO contacted Seagate for its perspective on the investigation but it had not returned our request at the time of publication.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has made its first move into the SSD market with the launch of its Ultrastar series.

The SSD400S range comes in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB and the company claims it is the first enterprise class SSD to offer both 2.5 inch 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5 inch 4Gbps Fibre Channel connections.

The product line was jointly developed by Hitachi and Intel and is aimed at companies looking to make the transition to tiered storage, allowing for a high performance level of storage that needs to be highly available.

"Hitachi's strategic investment and commitment in the enterprise market is evident with the new Ultrastar SSD family," said Mike Cordano, executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Hitachi.

"Our new SSD product family not only symbolises our market opportunity to serve evolving cloud data center infrastructures, but also delivers value to our customers in terms of increasing data center performance and reducing total cost of ownership."

Hitachi is laying claim to the highest sequential throughput in the industry with this group of SSDs as well. Read throughput is claimed to go as high as 535MBps, with write throughput hitting 500MB/s with 6Gbps SAS. For Fibre Channel, read hits 390MB/s and write goes to 340MB/s throughput.

IOPS claims are also impressive, with up to 46,000 read and 13,000 write "reaching speeds 100 times faster than traditional hard drives," claimed the firm.

The range is available now with a five year warrantee and Cordano expects volume shipments to begin early next year.