Hitachi virtually pools 32 petabytes

Hitachi Data Systems officials are ratcheting up the competitive heat in the race to handle huge volumes of stored data with its new TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP), which can bring together in a virtual pool up to 32 petabytes of addressable storage.

Both Hewlett Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc. were quick off the mark with systems that use Hitachi's technology. HP officials announced the StorageWorks XP12000 disk array based on the Hitachi system but using the company's own management software, while Sun introduced the StorEdge 9990 as a more or less straight sell through of the TagmaStore system under its own brand.

TagmaStore can store up to 332 terabytes internally using up to 192 Fibre Channel, 64 Enterprise Systems Connection and 48 Fiber Connectivity ports.

The system supports both Fujitsu and IBM Corp. mainframe operating systems, as well as network operating systems from HP, Sun, IBM, Novell Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc. and Red Hat Inc. plus Microsoft Windows 2000 and 2003.

Two features scheduled for release later this year are asynchronous replication software that allows users to move data between two USPs and storage systems attached to the receiving USP, and an ability to logically partition cache, Fibre Channel host ports, storage capacity and attached storage.

In a study of the new system, Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Tony Asaro said that the system can be used as a bigger, faster enterprise-class storage system as well as a storage virtualization platform.

"The USP has the potential to change the storage networking landscape by driving down the total cost of ownership of storage, simplifying complex storage networks and enabling data life cycle management," he said.

Nearly all of the 210 information technology managers surveyed for a recent report by the group on the storage industry believed that virtualization would affect storage management and costs, Asaro said.

Prices for the TagmaStore USP systems start at just less than $450,000.

Robinson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. He can be reached at hullite@mindspring.com.