HDS Brings Virtualization to the Midtier

Hitachi Data Systems on Monday unveiled several midrange offerings designed to bring its storage virtualization capabilities to a small-to-midsize audience experiencing rapid growth and shrinking storage capacity.

HDS, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., announced the TagmaStore Network Storage Controller Model NSC55, a slimmed-down version of its virtualization-driven TagmaStorage Universal Storage Platform released last year. Currently available for approximately $150,000 in a 5-terabyte configuration, the NSC55 manages up to 16 petabytes of externally attached storage and supports midrange storage systems from EMC Corp., IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., according to officials of the Santa Clara, Calif., company.

The NSC55 simplifies management of customers storage environments through a rack-mounted virtualization engine featuring local partitioning, a scalable parallel crossbar switch architecture for high availability and bolstered performance, and replication for business continuance. The new product is equipped with embedded NAS (network-attached storage) blades and native disk-base WORM (write once/read many) software tailored toward compliance and record retention requirements.

HDS seeks to bring storage-area networking to SMBs with its SAN Starter Solutions. Click here to read more.

HDS also rolled out on Monday the next generation of its Thunder 9500 V series. Available now, the TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage products, AMS200 and AMS500, support native Fibre Channel SAN (storage area network) and NAS workloads on Fibre Channel or SATA drives and can scale up to 40.5TB and 88.5TB, respectively, with Fibre Channel and SATA intermix.

On the lower end, HDS introduced the smaller WorkGroup Modular Storage product line featuring the WMS 100. The product can scale up to 42TB of raw capacity and is due for release in a few weeks, noted HDS officials.

Built to replace HDS existing Thunder 9520 and 9530 models, the SATA-based AMS and WMS products support up to 4G-bps Fibre Channel port connectivity and offer virtualization functionality, including Logical Cache Partitioning to support large computing environments and media rich applications, secure Host Storage Domains, and the ability to create up to 512 Virtual Storage Ports. Both storage products enable remote copy, backup and point-in-time snapshots.

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