News

posted on 11 April 2008 05:45

Hitachi has reportedly announced a server with hundreds of gigabytes of memory to provide 100 to 1,000 times more responsiveness to online requests and also speed general processing by reducing hard drive access needs. There are few details.

Hitachi sells a range of BladeSymphony products plus the SR1 1000 and SR8000 high performance computing (HPC) servers. The mysterious new server, described as a "large-capacity high-speed data processing solution", is not mentioned on Hitachi's web site.

It uses 128-256GB of DRAM main memory to reduce hard disk access frequency. There is a technology called event stream processing which analyses data generated in a process run in DRAM without it having to be stored in a temporary file or database on disk, thus slowing access to it.

There is also grid technology middleware from Gemstone Systems to distribute processing across a set of multiple servers.

That company's GemFire technology is used by the new Hitachi server and is described thus: "The GemFire Enterprise Data Fabric can help database-bound architectures decrease latency and improve scalability considerably. Through a predominantly memory-based data management scheme, the GemFire suite of products supports distributed caching of data (from a database) as objects, result-sets, or as tables in memory. This enables applications to consume data in the format they need without latency."

The event stream processing may well be based on GemFire Real Time Events technology.

Hitachi is reported as claimng that a stock exchange computer system could use its new server and middleware to cut its normal response time of several hundred milliseconds to seconds, to just a few seconds. An overnight batch run could be completed in a tenth to a thirtieth of the time taken by existing servers (or mainframes presumably.)

Hitachi claims that its implementation of what is effectively a RAM solid state disk (SSD) treated as main memory, is general purpose in nature and not just aimed at I/O-intensive workloads needing very fast response. It is unique because of that.

The middleware may be released on its own under the existing Hitachi 'uCosminexus' brand which is used for a variety of complex SOA-oriented middleware products.

The new server is targeted at traditional RAM SSD markets such as financial trading firms and banks. It is said to be available now but only in Japan. There is no brand name, no price and, in fact, not other details at all. All we have is a sales revenue target; $398 million by fiscal year 2010.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}