Hitachi Heads for SMB

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is pushing into the SMB market with a low-end version of its Thunder midrange system.

On Wednesday, Hitachi will announce availability of its Thunder 9520V system, bringing the enterprise-focused storage vendor belatedly into the emerging SMB space.

The new Thunder has SATA drives, comes in single- or dual-controller configurations, and offers SAN starter kit options that include low-end Emulex Corp. (NYSE: ELX) HBAs and eight-port switches from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) or McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA).

In the new gear, Hitachi has tried to retain many of the high-end features of midrange Thunder, such as virtual storage ports, support for 512 LUNs, and the same software, except for TrueCopy remote replication. We’re taking our high-end storage, and scaling, sizing, and pricing it for this market,” says Karen Sigman, Hitachi’s VP of worldwide channels.

Despite Hitachi’s positioning the Thunder 9250V as a first SAN for small companies, it is actually a higher-end system than entry-level offerings from competitors, including products such as the AX 100 from Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), StorageWorks MSA 1000 from Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and the IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) DS300 and DS400. (See EMC, Dell Get Small With SATA, HP and QLogic Aim Low, and IBM Launches iSCSI SAN.)Indeed, in pricing and capacity, Hitachi’s new system is more in line with lower-midrange systems, such as the EMC Clariion 300, HP MSA 1500, and IBM DS4000 in pricing and capacity.

Although pricing will be set by channel partners, Hitachi says a Thunder 9250V with dual controller and 3.4TB capacity would cost around $22,000 to $24,000. The vendor did not provide pricing for single-controller systems.

Besides a primary storage system for SMBs, the new Thunder can also serve as a backend to the Tagmastore for secondary low-cost storage.

There's a chance Hitachi might be shooting high for SAN newcomers. Do first-time users really want 512 LUNs, virtual ports, or 4.2 GByte/s of cached bandwidth -- all of which the new Thunder offers? Sigmans's answer: “We give them plenty of room to scale up.”

The new system also doesn't support iSCSI, which many pundits view as key to the SMB market. A Hitachi spokesman says the company's looking “very closely” at iSCSI but has no plans to announce any IP SANs in the short term.Perhaps it’s no surprise that Hitachi is the last major Fibre Channel SAN vendor to get into the SMB space. Hitachi’s strength has been in the high end. It has been more successful with its enterprise Lightning than with its midrange Thunder systems, and industry sources say it is off to a good start selling its Tagmastore enterprise systems, which rolled out in September (see Hitachi Struts Mr. Universal).

But like just about every other storage vendor, Hitachi sees the market heading to the low end. The Thunder 9520V is the first product Hitachi is selling exclusively through the channel as it joins the parade of vendors hoping to persuade smaller companies that they need networked storage.

Hitachi points to figures from market research firm IDC that shows the SMB market ripe for storage. IDC’s latest figures show revenue for entry-level and midrange storage systems grew while high-end systems declined (see IDC Releases Disk Figures).

At least one analyst thinks storage vendors are in danger of overestimating the SMB market. The Yankee Group

analyst Stephanie Balaouras says many SMBs lack the budget and expertise for Fibre Channel SANs, and favor iSCSI or NAS as their first storage systems.

“I don’t know how well Fibre Channel SANs will play in the SMB market,” she says. “I think those systems are better for midsize enterprises and up. I think the SMBs are looking for systems a lot smaller than the vendors imagine.”— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch