New G-SPEED eS PRO XL Brings Blazing Performance, Huge Capacity and Low Cost to High-End HD and 2K Film Production

LAS VEGAS --(Business Wire)-- Apr 20, 2009 - G-Technology by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new G-SPEED eS PRO XL, a rack-mount, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expansion solution, with mini-SAS connectivity, providing high-performance, low-cost RAID for professional content creation applications. The new G-Technology® G-SPEED™ eS PRO XL comes in a 2U 12-drive, or 3U 16-drive rack-mount enclosure, with hot swappable SATA 3Gb/s hard drives for high-performance, high-capacity, expandable direct-attached storage for small film studios and production houses.

Supporting the real-world performance needs of multi-stream uncompressed HD and 2K workflows, the G-SPEED eS PRO XL in a 3U RAID 5 delivers sustained read/write speeds of more than 650 megabytes per second (MB/sec), making it ideal for real-time video editing and digital intermediate (DI) film applications. A simple-to-use, web-based control panel allows users to easily manage, configure and monitor the system.

The G-SPEED eS PRO XL ships with a two-port mini-SAS RAID controller card and a locking, two-meter mini-SAS cable, allowing users to easily and affordably scale from an entry-level 12 TB 2U solution up to an incredible 192 TB. The PCIe x8 RAID controller supports JBOD and RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5 and 6. Up to eight G-SPEED eS PRO XL units can be connected to one RAID controller card, allowing an enormous amount of data-intensive video, graphic material and audio files to be centrally stored and managed.

“Compared to Fibre Channel solutions, our new G-SPEED eS PRO XL with mini SAS instantly changes the economics of deploying a rack-mount solution in a small studio or high end production house,” said Roger Mabon, vice president of G-Technology by Hitachi GST. “The value of the G-SPEED eS PRO XL enables a new class of customers to benefit from the performance, reliability and scalability without breaking their IT budgets.”

Mac OS X and Windows compatible, the G-Technology G-SPEED eS PRO XL will ship in May 2009. It comes with a three-year standard warranty with pricing starting at $6,999 MSRP for 12 TB in a 2U rack-mount enclosure.