Hitachi Wants to Deliver Universal Storage Platform to the Midmarket

Hitachi Data Systems unveiled its Universal Storage Platform V series. Positioned toward smaller enterprises, the Universal Storage Platform VM delivers the benefits of enterprise-class virtualization, thin provisioning and tiered storage across a heterogeneous storage services platform.

The company says that the storage package doesn’t require a raised floor data center and that it operates on an industry standard 220-volt power supply. Both are good options to help meet the demands of a smaller enterprise. According to Josh Krischer, founder, Josh Krischer & Associates, a leading storage research firm, Hitachi’s innovation engine is moving the company further ahead of competitors in entry-level enterprise-class storage technologies.

The rackmounted storage platform offers the same service available as the Universal Storage Platform V: Hitachi’s Dynamic Provisioning software, Universal Volume Manager with support for up to 96 petabytes, large logical storage pools, and Hitachi Virtual Partition Manager. And it has also added a newly enhanced parallel crossbar switch architecture with 4Gb/s fibre-channel to deliver 75% more peak IOPs than their previous rackmount virtualization products.

Interestingly, the system has also added support for VMware ESX Server 3.0 – a product that is owned by its competitor in the storage solution field, EMC – although HDS doesn’t seem to have a problem with its ties to EMC.

And while aimed at the mid-range market, the USP VM will cost around $60,000 for the basic system controller without any disk storage. And the other problem is that it doesn’t seem to support the cheaper SATA or SAS drives, instead opting to support the more expensive Fibre disks.