Hitachi accuses EMC of smear campaign

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has accused storage rival EMC of a dirty tricks campaign over an analyst report which claimed that the former had exaggerated the performance of its Lightening 9900 storage array.

EMC said it commissioned the report from US analyst firm Robert Frances Group as a neutral overview of enterprise storage vendors' claims versus actual performance.

The study concluded that the data throughput of Lightning 9900 is just 1.6Gb per second, half the 3.2Gb claimed. The dispute centres on the data throughput of the system's four cache memory boards.

The analyst report said that each board is capable of up to 500Mb per second, but Hitachi is adamant that the real figure is 800Mb at a conservative estimate.

Ed Broderick, the report's author, told vnunet.com's sister publication Network News that the study showed HDS' equipment had performed about 10 per cent better than rival kit from IBM and EMC, but did not match HDS' claims. He said he approached all the vendors in the report but HDS refused to meet with him or discuss his findings.

HDS' marketing manager Ludovic Leforestier claimed that the analyst group was paid by EMC as part of a smear campaign. Broderick and EMC strongly deny this.

"It is a compilation of erroneous and misleading information," said Leforestier, claiming that all the report's figures were directly taken from an EMC performance paper.

He added that he believed the analyst firm was a "money-in/garbage-out report outlet" and that the report contained serious errors in reasoning, implying that all data comes from disk when in enterprise storage most comes from cache.

EMC spokesman Michael O'Malley said HDS' allegations were absolute rubbish. "They don't like the results so they are saying it wasn't a valid report," he said.