When Amble decided to replace the EMC storage, flexibility and reliability were the most important considerations for a new system, he said.

Cost, however, was not a major factor in the search, Amble said. The new storage-area network cost about $25 million, a little more than half of which is equipment from Hitachi Data Systems Corp. It also includes technology from other vendors, including IBM and Spectra Logic Corp.

Fidelity is already saving money thanks to a reduction in the number of outages in the new system, Amble said.

The network uses three tiers of storage, with the most recently used data on more expensive but faster systems.

Tier 1 is based on Hitachi's TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform USP1100, which offers 150TB of raw storage and runs an Oracle database containing information on current closing properties.