Virtualisation at the core of new HDS offering
Virtualisation at the core of new HDS offering
Hitachi Data Systems has taken the wraps of its long awaited new TagmaStore storage platform, which offers virtualisation of up to 32 petabytes (32 million gigabytes) of data.
The platform has been designed with a view to reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of storage by more effectively managing the user's storage environment, aggregating internal and external storage into a single virtual storage pool.
Acknowledging that many of its customers have multi-vendor storage infrastructures, the system is designed to ease interoperability with devices made by other vendors. HP and Sun Microsystems have already lent their support to the new innovation.
"We asked our customers 'what do you need' and they came back and told us that they need to be able to aggregate their disparate storage systems. Now we could've said 'You don't need multiple storage vendors, you only need us', but the only problem with that is that is not what the landscape looks like at the moment so they needed us to aggregate for them," said Tim Smith, HDS' marketing manager, ANZ. "The ability to deliver a virtual storage machine is one thing, but it becomes its own management nightmare unless it can be divided up for application requirements.
"The next request was a single replication engine, so rather than having to replicate my data from Site A to Site B per storage system, I want to be able to simplify that replication to reduce my total cost of ownership."
Smith continued: "The final two pieces were 'how do I enhance quality of service for my applications and then manage it.' These are the goals we set ourselves as an organisation…and that's how we ended up with the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, and it's massive."
"Simplifying storage management….is a 'must have' in order to reduce the total cost of ownership of storage networks," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Two major initiatives to achieve lower storage TCO include storage consolidation and implementing intelligence in the fabric. The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform is an enterprise-class storage system that enables massive consolidation, and at the same time is a virtualisation platform used to manage other external storage systems."
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