Organizations have been dealing with a number of challenging trends that stress their storage infrastructure. Some of them are the rapid growth in the use of virtual servers, each requiring a sizable amount of storage; the rapid growth in both structured and unstructured data that can be attributed to the increasing need to comply with regulations and a multitude of other factors. Hitachi Data Systems ust launched Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and a companion storage management tool called the Hitachi Command Suite (HCS) with the hopes of addressing this challenge.
It appears that Hitachi combined industry standard storage devices with a very intelligent control system and sophisticated management software. They’re calling this approach a “3D scaling storage platform.” What they mean by this catch phrase is that the storage control system can manage environmental requirements to, in their words, scale up to larger storage devices, scale out to more storage devices and scale deep to include both established storage devices as well as newer technology.
The secret sauce appears to be a clever, but simple in concept, storage pool management concept that allows the controller to efficiently and rapidly manage a large pool of storage resources.
While interesting, Hitachi’s new product faces stiff competition from all over the world of storage. EMC, NetApp, HP and others are also offering an array of increasingly intelligent devices. If your organization is looking for ways to optimize its storage capabilities, the Virtual Storage Platform is worth a glance.
