Keeping a secret is easy ; keeping a surprise is much harder, as anyone aware of today’s launch of Hitachi Data Systems’ (HDS) new Lightning storage array can attest to. In the past few weeks, there has been enough Wall Street reports, half-baked trade stories, misinformation from competitors and whisperings from HDS insiders for an epic novel on the subject.

At last, here is the official story. TagmaStore, which means "to organize" in Greek, is the third generation of HDS’ high-end Lightning and the first refresh of the product since June 2000. TagmaStore comes in three models, the USP 100 (77 TByte), the USP600 (154 TByte) and USP 1100 (332 TByte). The top USP model is scalable up to 32 PByte. At 2 million IOPs and 68 GBps throughput, it is almost five times faster than the current generation. It starts with a single cabinet and scales to 1,152 drives, instead of the older model’s two cabinets for a minimum system and a peak of 1,024 drives, which meant a cumbersome forklift upgrade.

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