Hitachi Server Group today unveiled BladeSymphony® 2000, its new high-end, enterprise-class blade server, together with major enhancements and new blades for its mid-range BladeSymphony® 320 system. For organizations that are interested in consolidating infrastructure, optimizing workloads, and reducing the cost, risk, and complexity of IT, today’s announcement represents a significant advance.

BladeSymphony® 2000 leapfrogs the capabilities of competitive UNIX servers and blade systems from other vendors. With a balanced system architecture that combines massive throughput, embedded virtualization, and unprecedented configuration flexibility, the new 10U, 8-blade system is aimed squarely at the most I/O-intensive workloads and/or consolidation through virtualization:

• Dual-socket blades powered by Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series processors for high performance, energy efficiency, and dynamic scalability
• Support for up to 144GB memory and 162 Gbps of I/O throughput on each blade
• New high-performance, high-bandwidth, hybrid I/O subsystem leverages both industry-standard PCIe Gen2.0 slots and integrated switches, allowing configurations to share a common switching infrastructure and unique I/O interfaces per blade, expanding workload options
• Includes enhanced Virtage, the industry’s first firmware-embedded virtualization solution, a mainframe-class technology that leverages Intel VT technologies to improve performance and lower overhead
• Virtage with hardware virtualization (LPARs), along with Microsoft® Hyper-V™ and VMware®—or all three in a single system— provides the greatest virtualization flexibility in the industry, expanding options and increasing agility
• Greener, more eco-effective platform supports high-efficiency 80 GOLD PLUS power supplies and power capping features

The enhanced BladeSymphony® 320 far exceeds the capabilities and density of competitive rack-mount servers and other blade servers in providing simple, reliable compute power for the enterprise, the branch, or the remote office. The latest enhancements to this 6U system increase performance and reliability while decreasing power consumption.

• Powered by Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series processors, the new family of 2-socket blades doubles the transaction throughput rate of previous blades with 3x the memory of its predecessor
• Four new blade options deliver the flexibility to manage a wide array of mid-tier to high-end business-critical workloads:

				-- One new blade is optimized for standard configurations, including support for 2 hot-swap SAS HDD drives
				-- A second new blade is optimized for SAN connectivity
				-- A third new blade supports 6 300GB SAS drives for a total of 1.8TB per blade for a maximum configuration of 9TB and 20 x 5500 cores in a single 6U chassis
				-- A PCI blade will be made available later in the year

“The focus of our product development efforts has been balanced performance and maximum flexibility,” said Steve Campbell, Vice President, Marketing and Solutions for Hitachi Server Group. “The system performance of the new BladeSymphony® 2000 is a 50% improvement over previous-generation servers; memory capacity is four times bigger; and I/O is a seven-fold improvement. Our balanced architecture delivers the high-productivity computing needed for enterprise-class workloads, and the choices we offer in virtualization technologies and industry-standard components give our customers by far the broadest configuration flexibility in the industry.”

The new BladeSymphony® 2000 model and the enhanced BladeSymphony® 320 system will be available June 1, 2009. Pricing information is available through authorized resellers.