Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced that it will expand its family of blade and rack server products for the enterprise market. The forthcoming Hitachi Compute Systems will be based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family introduced today by Intel Corporation.

"By leveraging the new Intel Xeon processor E5 family, upcoming Hitachi Compute Systems will feature faster performance, higher density and greater energy efficiency," said Roberto Basilio, vice president, Infrastructure Platforms Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. "Hitachi Compute Systems offer innovative designs with unique advantages in scalability, flexible I/O configuration and high availability. They are ideal servers upon which to build converged data center solutions. Seamless management integration with Hitachi Data Systems storage and data networking components give customers an easy operational interface. This saves costs, reduces errors and allows faster, more effective deployment and management of virtual IT environments - all of which create greater efficiencies across the data center."

Hitachi Compute Systems are built upon a solid foundation of more than 50 years of R&D innovation and leadership in the enterprise server market. Hitachi Data Systems sells Hitachi Compute Blade and Hitachi Compute Rack servers based on Intel Xeon processors globally. They are part of an expanding portfolio of pre-tested converged data center solutions that offers tight integration between Hitachi storage, compute and industry-standard data networking systems. This integration delivers significant advantages in enterprise-class reliability, deployment speed, performance and management compared to loosely coupled solutions offered by other vendors that require significantly more time to configure and manage.

Organizations can deploy applications faster and with more predictability because Hitachi Data Systems converged data center solutions are pre-configured and optimized for leading applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010, SAP HANA and solutions with VMware. Hitachi converged data center solutions drive operational efficiencies that can reduce costs and improve centralized management of enterprise application implementations.

"Through its new innovations, the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family provides exceptional energy efficiency, increased security, flexible performance and the opportunity for streamlining customer's data centers," said Dylan Larson, director of marketing for Intel's Datacenter Infrastructure Group. "Hitachi platforms take advantage of these innovations to deliver the versatility and performance that every customer is demanding."

Hitachi Compute Systems Leverage LPAR Technology
The current portfolio of Hitachi Compute Systems consists of two blade server product lines, Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and Hitachi Compute Blade 320, both of which are intended for high performance, high availability applications. The portfolio also includes a family of rack-optimized servers, Hitachi Compute Rack, that are the foundation for dedicated, packaged solutions such as the company's award-winning object store, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).

Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and Hitachi Compute Blade 320 feature logical partition (LPAR) technology, an embedded hardware virtualization feature typically found only on mainframes and other high-end systems. An ideal complement to host-based virtualization, LPAR technology improves optimization of resources and enables customers to decrease overhead costs and increase manageability, reliability and performance. In addition, Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 with LPAR is the only blade server to include unique blade SMP interconnect technology that improves scalability by allowing users to configure multiple blades to work as a single system.

Hitachi Data Systems will announce new server products and converged solutions, based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family announced today, throughout the remainder of the calendar year.