HDS debuts Virtual Storage Platform

Dynamic Tiering is killer app, firm believes

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has unveiled its Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), offering a range of new features that the company claims can improve data storage efficiency while reducing costs.

The firm says VSP enables customers to integrate multi-vendor external storage into the storage pool and provides a single platform for block, file and content with central management, data protection and search.

It can reduce TCO by 33% in the first year when compared to monolithic architectures, HDS claims, and also reduce storage acquisition costs by 70%. HDS added that it can reduce both the storage footprint and carbon emissions by more than 30%.

Speaking at a press event today in Amsterdam, Michael Vath, SVP and GM, EMEA, said that all the company's products had to be virtualised, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable and this new product fits the bill.

Talking to CBR about the announcement, Johannes Kunz, VP, services, EMEA, said that new Dynamic Tiering software is the most important feature of this announcement, as it completes the quartet mentioned by Vath by adding automation to HDS's arsenal.

"We've done virtualisation, cloud and sustainability, " he said," but we've never done automation to as big a level. It's what customers wanted and what the market needed - the ability to be flexible and move chunks of data around automatically."

The page-level Dynamic Tiering automates the page-based movement of data to the most appropriate drive, from SSDs at the top, 2.5-inch SAS hard disk drives in Tier 1 and 2TB SATA drives in Tier 2. This means the more expensive SSDs will be kept for the most valuable and most commonly-accessed data, making the whole process much more efficient, HDS said.

Bob Plumridge, Hitachi Data Systems' technical marketing director for EMEA added that the introduction of Dynamic Tiering means customers no longer need to classify data manually as part of their information lifecycle management approaches.

• Share:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•