Hitachi Data Systems is virtualizing all EMC Symmetrix systems with its TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform.
The company claims that EMC CLARiiON CX systems will be supported by the end of January.
The Universal Storage Platform extends the useful life of installed storage assets, reduces operational costs and software licensing fees, and provides asynchronous remote copy and logical partitioning, which is a feature that is not available on any EMC products.
“Customers can now revitalize their existing EMC storage systems with the latest advanced Hitachi software by leveraging the virtualization layer within the Universal Storage Platform, which essentially ‘maps’ new functionality to all externally attached storage systems,” says Hitachi’s General Manager of Storage Systems Development, Yoshinori Okami. “This means you can take a CLARiiON, virtualize it, and enable it to store mainframe data on SATA disks; you can take a DMX attach it to a Universal Storage Platform and virtualize it as part of a logical partition, assigning dedicated resources to an individual application; you can move data from CLARiiONs to Symmetrixes and back, enabling true ILM — the possibilities are revolutionary, and Hitachi is bringing it to EMC customers first.”
Since Hitachi announced the Universal Storage Platform in September, the company has completed virtualization testing for numerous HP, IBM, Sun, and EMC storage systems.
“HP is committed to supporting heterogeneous storage. This is another example of that value and enables organizations to implement tiered storage across a broader set of arrays, providing customers with mission-critical information availability and lower cost tiered storage all in the same management view,” stated Chris Powers, Director, StorageWorks High-End Array Development for HP.
“This announcement further demonstrates Sun’s ability to provide innovation in data management by leveraging its own intellectual property, as well as the strength of its world-class partners,” said James Whitemore, vice president of marketing for Network Storage at Sun. “We are delivering on our promise to bring open virtualization solutions to a broad cross-section of our customers. These new solutions, coupled with Sun’s systems approach and Solaris 10 — the most storage-friendly operating system in the industry — will help customers simplify their infrastructure and get the best application performance for their money.”
“Our virtualization solution, the first controller-based implementation in the industry, doesn’t rely on API bartering between storage or switch vendors, or require any appliances or routers in the data path,” said Hitachi Data Systems CTO, Hu Yoshida. “Indeed, Hitachi simply extended the internal virtualization capabilities it has developed over the last twelve years to external storage, especially leveraging the virtual storage ports concept. The Universal Storage Platform appears as a Fibre Channel Standard interface to all storage devices connected via Fibre Channel. As such, supported storage systems connect to the Universal Storage Platform via the Fibre Channel Standard interface, much like a Windows or UNIX server would. So, support wise, it’s no different from attaching a CLARiiON, Symmetrix or DMX storage system to a host server through VERITAS Volume Manager. However, once an external device is virtualized and added to the Universal Storage Platform’s storage pool, it gains the full functionality of the Universal Storage Platform and it’s all managed from a single pane of glass.”
An article at SearchStorage.com points out that, the company’s approach to virtualization is debatable.
“The TagmaStore combines a massively parallel, crossbar switch with a storage controller inside a RAID array to enable a heterogeneous view of both host and storage resources.
Its critics argue that this method is a proprietary implementation, which defeats the purpose of virtualization. In other words, users are stuck with Hitachi’s tools to run all their functionality and must scrap any investment in software on other attached storage.”
That certainly raises an interesting point.
Chris is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
