Further expanding its industry lead in enterprise storage system performance while crushing through the limitations of aging monolithic architectures, Hitachi today announced that its flagship Universal Storage Platform™ V achieved the highest Storage Performance Council (SPC-1) benchmark result in enterprise storage system history, eclipsing the results of every single enterprise storage system ever tested using this widely recognized industry-standard benchmark.

The Hitachi USP V nearly doubled the performance levels achieved by competitors’ enterprise storage systems tested under the SPC-1 methodology, achieving 200,245.73 SPC IOPS™ in the SPC-1 benchmark with a single storage controller — delivering incredibly fast response times at a lower price point, providing exceptional storage economics to end-users.

“Evaluator Group has been a strong proponent of the SPC since it published its first results in 2001 and encourage our clients to use these results for competitive comparisons. With these very impressive results the USP V has significantly raised the performance bar for enterprise storage systems,” said Chuck Standerfer, senior partner, Evaluator Group. “We would encourage the other enterprise storage vendors to graciously accept this challenge and publish their SPC results so that customers would have a valid independent source for comparisons.”

This independent SPC-1 benchmark result complements the already established performance achievements of the landmark Hitachi USP V, which continues to lead the industry in maximum cached IOPS, delivering a blistering 3.5 million peak cached IOPS, an advantage of between 75-300 percent over other enterprise storage systems in the market, providing customers with a storage services platform with essentially no limitation as its limitation.

“These excellent SPC results prove what we already knew here at the Enterprise Strategy Group,” said Brian Garrett, technical director, Enterprise Strategy Group Lab. “Based on a keen understanding of the storage performance requirements within large organizations, a combination of both hardware and software core competencies and a continuous string of innovations in recent years, Hitachi Data Systems has taken the already fast USP V to another level.”

“These benchmark results are further proof that the Hitachi USP V basically makes typical enterprise storage performance issues a non-issue," said Carl Greiner, senior vice president, Infrastructure Research, OVUM. “By doubling the previous top SPC performance result, customers can be increasingly confident that the Hitachi USP V will deliver maximum value supporting their IT infrastructures, both today and in the future.”

“For customers seeking absolutely peak performance and the fastest response times from their business-critical applications, the Hitachi USP V has the requisite horsepower to meet any business or IT challenge and elevate storage performance and utilization to a new trajectory,” said Roberto Basilio, senior director, Enterprise Storage Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. “These results further solidify Hitachi’s position as the leader in high-end storage environments.”

What this new SPC-1 benchmark result means for customers is:

• Greater Productivity: Sustain significantly more business transactions than any other enterprise storage system in the market, boosting sales and profitability
• Increased Efficiency: Greatly improve application response time to single-digit millisecond levels and support more users, more applications, and handle more capacity on a centrally managed platform that leverages years of mature and reliable microcode
• Lower TCO: Run a multitude of applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle Database 11g, concurrently on a single storage controller
• Reduced Risk: If your applications don’t perform well, then your business suffers — performance definitively matters to business success

For more information on the SPC-1 result for the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, visit: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1