Hitachi launches attack on NAS market
Hitachi launches attack on NAS market
Apr 06, 2005: Hitachi Data Systems has made an aggressive push into the NAS market with the release of NAS Blades for the high-end enterprise down to the SMB market, to solve the headaches of managing dozens of islands of file servers or NAS filer appliances.
Hitachi expects the NAS Blades to be used in an enterprise environment for consolidating existing NAS gateways and filers. Just one can consolidate multiple NAS filers and large NAS workloads.
Research from IDC has revealed that the NAS market to grow at a compound annual growth rte of 14.7 percent by 2008, which Hitachi believes presents it with a significant opportunity to take market share from established NAS vendors.
John McArthur, the group vice president and general manager of information infrastructure research at IDC, said: "Customers are increasingly looking for solutions that deliver block and file services from a centrally managed pool of storage resources.
"Hitachi, Ltd., offers a unique solution that enables SAN and NAS to coexist within a single, highly scalable, centrally managed storage system, through an embedded NAS blade architecture."
According Hitachi, the NAS Blade is the first one to provide co-existence of NAS and SAN data in the same storage pool under the same management. It also integrates with the Universal Storage Platform, and exploits all of its advanced virtualisation capabilities.
This includes managing EMC Symmetrix and CLARiiON CS series storage systems and IBM TotalStorage DS4000 and ESS 2105 models.
Fred Huang, the vice president of storage infrastructure product management for Hitachi Data Systems, said: "By providing embedded NAS Blades in the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform we are delivering an intelligent platform for future storage and data applications. This provides better management, security, and significantly lower cost of infrastructure for network connectivity."
Tony Asaro, a senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, added: "Offering a NAS blade in the USP is a smart move. HDS customers now have SAN and NAS storage in a single system."
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