Building on its standing over competitors in storage virtualization implementations worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation introduced enhancements to the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and Universal Storage Platform VM. With this announcement, Hitachi is delivering an advanced, market-proven storage services platform that enables customers to gain reductions in capital and operational expenditures, improved storage utilization and efficiency, and lower environmental footprints across their entire storage infrastructure.

“Hitachi continues to enhance its high-end storage systems and cross-platform storage management software at an industry record pace. The fact that the company can deliver advanced storage services that businesses can quickly and economically deploy across their entire storage infrastructure makes it a very powerful and attractive customer value proposition,” said Josh Krischer, founder, Josh Krischer & Associates. “The ability to remotely replicate thinly provisioned volumes enables customers requiring high availability and disaster recovery a protection solution at much lower costs. Further, Hitachi now offers peak levels of application performance with the ability to lock very large volumes into the highly-sophisticated cache architecture of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V. The wide selection of media, from flash-based to the 1 terabyte SATA hard disk drives with large capacity and performance, spans the ability to non-disruptively migrate volumes from cache to different type of disk drives, which allows end users to build internal tiered storage to optimize CAPEX and OPEX expenditures to deliver on the right service levels back to the business. The large capacity drives, for both mainframe and other platforms allow for effective reductions in power, cooling, and thus, carbon dioxide emissions, as well as floor space."

New Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning Software Delivers Improved Business Resilience
Continuing to set the pace for enterprise storage hardware and software innovation, Hitachi announced enhancements to its Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software with support for local and remote replication of thin provisioned volumes. Leveraging the advanced asynchronous and synchronous replication capabilities of the Hitachi Universal Replicator and Hitachi TrueCopy software in combination with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning eliminates the need to replicate the unused portion of a volume allocation, reducing the hefty capacity requirements typically associated with remote replication. This offers customers greater flexibility in both daily data asset protection functions and disaster recovery procedures (see separate press release).

“Hitachi is the only storage company with the ability to extend all of the advanced storage functionality that resides in the powerful Hitachi intelligent virtual storage controllers as services such as, thin provisioning and replication,” said John Mansfield, senior vice president, Global Solutions Strategy and Development, Hitachi Data Systems. “An even greater benefit to customers is that these powerful storage services can be easily and economically aggregated to enhance externally attached, multi-vendor storage devices — delivering unparalleled consolidation and efficiency benefits as well as reductions in overall TCO. With more than 9,100 intelligent virtual storage controllers shipped worldwide, Hitachi is the market leader in the enterprise storage space.”

Support for Flash-Based Drives and 1 Terabyte SATA II Hard Disk Drives
Escalating storage growth from new applications coupled with regulatory demands continue to pressure organizations’ IT budgets and expose inefficiencies in traditional storage architectures. Today, Hitachi is expanding on its tiered storage strategy by announcing support for 1 terabyte SATA II hard disk drives in both open systems and mainframe environments. The high capacity, lower cost design of these disk drives provide a new range of storage density that contributes to a more efficient and cost-effective tiered storage implementation, while also forging closer alignment between service-level requirements and business-critical applications. In addition, this new functionality is also designed to improve the environmental footprint of customers’ storage infrastructures through reductions in power, cooling and floor space requirements.

Recognizing the need for high operational throughput and bandwidth of customers’ most critical applications, Hitachi also announced support for flash-based drives for the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM storage services platforms. Combining the industry’s highest performance drives with the industry-leading high-end storage services platform is designed to deliver unsurpassed applications performance, availability and scalability, with the highest bandwidth available on the market.

Customers requiring these high-performance drives will be able to leverage the advanced tiered storage capabilities of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V to enable non-disruptive, transparent data migration between flash-based volumes and traditional hard disk drives. Furthermore, Hitachi has continued to build and expand its capabilities based on its advanced massively parallel Universal Star Network V crossbar switch architecture which enables more speedy and efficient transfer of data from cache memory, offering even better performance for flash-based drives than traditional cache architectures. Customers benefit from the most sophisticated and cost-effective cross-tier management of heterogeneous storage assets, while maximizing the return on their investment.

The New Universal Storage Platform V Delivers Double Cache Capacity
The sophistication of internal traffic handling within the Universal Star Network V architecture has been enhanced to deliver double the maximum cache capacity over its predecessor, to 512 gigabytes. Unlike other cache architectures, Hitachi’s patented advanced massively parallel processing design improves application performance by isolating workloads into cache memory partitions and ultimately optimizing storage configurations based on the specific requirements of business applications.

Hitachi’s approach to storage management puts control into the hands of business and IT managers who can work together to deliver the precise storage services that a business requires, within the right cost structure. Furthermore, the revolutionary Hitachi controller-based virtualization engine enables clients to leverage the powerful combination of external virtualization, thin provisioning, logical partitioning and storage-agnostic replication to deliver intelligent storage services across the entire enterprise to all tiers of storage using a proven, secure platform.

Support for Internet Protocol Version 6
Meeting the compliance requirements of the latest, large-scale Internet Protocol (IP) networking standards mandated by the U.S. Federal Government, Hitachi today also announced support of the next-generation Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), for the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM storage systems.