Hitachi raises storage ante

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) last week released a new hardware and software platform that some experts said raises the benchmark for managing heterogeneous enterprise storage through virtualisation, replication and partitioning. HP and Sun have extended their alliances with HDS and will also sell the new products.

HDS's new TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) is an ambitious attempt to put the Japanese giant at the forefront of managing the storage subsystems of rivals. The need to control data across multiple storage systems has long been seen as one of the most important challenges facing IT managers confronted with ever-growing mountains of data, but proprietary systems have so far stymied progress.

The new USP systems offer support for up to 1,153 drives, and capacities up to 165 terabytes - more when parent firm Hitachi releases 300GB disks later this year.

Through updates and additions to accompanying software lines, the USP storage servers are intended to act as the front-end to legacy storage subsystems from HDS and rivals. The company's Universal Volume Manager software allows up to 32 petabytes of data to be aggregated into a common storage pool and managed through a single set of tools.

Policies can be applied so that critical information can be accessed quickly, for example, while less urgent data is archived on lower-cost platforms. Partition Manager software allows storage to be dynamically managed with administrators able to apply quality-of-service settings.

The ability to better manage data held in isolation on multiple servers from multiple vendors offers potentially huge cost savings. "It's currently too expensive to provide a common management solution for the fragmented data assets of a firm," said Dave Vellante, chief executive of ITCentrix, a storage services company. "Based on our extensive analysis, nothing else compares to this product. This changes the dynamics of the storage industry."

Tony Asaro of analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group said, "[USP] enables massive consolidation, and at the same time is a virtualisation platform used to manage other external storage systems."

HDS software director Bob Plumridge said standards from industry consortium SNIA had helped to make heterogeneous storage management a reality.

For the latest news for IT professionals, visit ITWeek.co.uk