Hitachi Data Systems Pools Storage Virtualization Appliances

The new Hitachi High Availability Manager works with the HDS Universal Storage Platform V appliance to combine the capacity of multiple vendors' arrays into a single pool, said Claus Mikkelsen, CTO of storage architectures for the company.

The USP V virtualizes its own internally attached storage capacity as well as the capacity of multiple externally attached arrays from other vendors, including EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and others, into a single pool of storage that can be centrally managed.

The difference that Hitachi High Availability Manager brings is the ability to cluster multiple USP V-created pools into a larger single pool to ensure that data is continuously available wherever it resides and regardless of the type of data being stored, Mikkelsen said.

This capability is important as customers continue to accumulate data at an ever-faster rate, Mikkelsen said.

This includes mainframe and open systems data, structured and unstructured data, and block-format or file-format data, much of which is stored on arrays from different vendors that are not connected to each other, he said.

And much of that capacity is severely underutilized, with average capacity utilization rates of 20 percent to 30 percent. "For those concerned about power and cooling, that's another way of saying 60 to 80 percent of the disks are spinning for no reason," he said.

Furthermore, Mikkelsen said that different types of users store data created by a variety of applications, and management of those different islands of data is a nightmare. "We believe they should be consolidated into a pool of storage so they can be centrally managed," he said.

Hitachi High Availability Manager serves a number of vital functions in enterprises concerned with the availability of their growing stores of diverse types of data, Mikkelsen said.

First, it protects data against the small daily disasters that happen in order to ensure continuous availability of that data regardless of what happens in a customer's data center.

Second, it provides nondisruptive, seamless migration of data from one array to another, regardless of vendor or where the array is sitting, for such purposes as moving storage to a new application with no host outage and little or no preplanning. "We can move data from anywhere to anywhere without disruption," he said.

Finally, it increases business availability and efficiency by providing 100 percent data availability.

Hitachi High Availability Manager is currently available.