Acer and Hitachi join storage forces

ACER AND HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS (HDS), the storage arm of Hitachi, have announced a partnership to bring better storage to small and medium businesses.

HDS's general manager of the small and medium channel in EMEA, Jean-Luc Cervera reckons that all businesses, regardless of size, have effectively the same storage requirements, just on different scales.

The two companies have jointly released the GS2040 aimed at meeting the storage requirements of Exchange servers, VMware containers, databases and the like.

The GS2040 can handle up to 120TB of SATA or 36GB of SAS raw storage and up to 400,000 IOPS through 512 virtual server ports.

The GS2040 promises 99.999 per cent up time, the so-called five nines of reliability, thanks to complete redundancy through support for Raid 6 - which allows any two drives to fail without the loss of data - along with a mirrored cache and battery backup.

It can support one or two controllers, each of which has 2GB of cache and can host two fibre channel or two 4Gbps iSCSI connections.

It also ships with Hitachi's dynamic load balancing controller and management software to help with diagnostics, reporting, recovery, provisioning, backup, replication and auditing.

Despite being co-branded with HDS, the GS2040 will be marketed through Gateway and as with all such branded products in EMEA and Asia, it will only be available through the company's B2B channel partners. µ