SANTA CLARA, CA – Hitachi Data Systems has announced a number of performance enhancements to the Hitachi Freedom Storage(TM) Lightning 9900(TM) system, highlighted by the availability of 2-Gigabit per second Fibre Channel connectivity. The Lightning 9900 is reportedly the industry's first high-end storage system to deploy 2 Gbps technology, increasing performance by as much as 40 percent over the earlier 1 Gbps technology. Shipping of the advanced capability will begin in October. "With today's announcement Hitachi Data Systems becomes the first company to offer 2 Gbps capability across our entire product line," said Ron Gervenack, Hitachi Data Systems executive vice president and general manager, Storage Solutions. "Leveraging its internal switched architecture, the industry-leading throughput of the Lighting 9900 will be greatly improved with this new high-speed Fibre Channel adapter. Customers will benefit from faster access to their information and quicker decision making." "HDS was the first enterprise storage vendor to market with 2-gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity on its midrange Thunder 9200 platform, and continues to lead the industry by launching 2-gigabit high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity on its Lightning 9900 Series platform," said Robert M. Montague, managing director of System Area Networks Research at securities firm Dain Rauscher Wessels. "HDS' other system enhancements unveiled today also underscore HDS' position among the leaders in the enterprise RAID storage market." Launched in June 2000, the Lightning 9900 introduced the Hi-Star(TM) "internal switch" architecture that made it the highest performing storage system in the industry with an effective internal bandwidth of 6.4 Gigabytes per second. The performance gain was obtained by eliminating the inherent bottlenecks experienced by widely used systems based on the long-established "shared bus" architecture. The performance increases achieved with 2 Gbps connections are in addition to a substantial improvement to the Lightning 9900 made earlier this year. In February, Hitachi Data Systems made available advanced technology that boosts the Lightning's performance by as much as 20 percent when used in configurations where a large number of servers feed data in parallel into the storage system. Users of large databases are among those who can accomplish substantially more work by taking advantage of this capability. For more information visit www.hds.com