Hitachi Looks To Partners To Strike Lightning Again

"It has a unique set of capabilities," said HDS president and COO Dave Roberson, speaking at the launch of TagmaStore last week at New York's Guggenheim Museum. One HDS partner, Jim Grogan, vice president of alliances at Sungard Availability Services, said high-availability data life-cycle management has historically been limited to the largest of enterprises—at best, the top 5 percent. While not shabby, TagmaStore extends the market to the top 50 percent of all enterprises, Grogan said.

"It should excite the marketplace," Grogan told VARBusiness. Sungard is one of the largest providers of high-availability services to customers, both in terms of deploying solutions of virtually every storage vendor, as well as providing its own managed backup and recovery services.

The cost of the solution, which could start at several hundred thousand dollars and work its way up to seven figures, is not the hindering barrier to selling high-availability storage systems, Grogan said. Rather, it's other intangibles, such as personnel to manage multiple vendors systems and cost for telecommunications to cover peak time periods. TagmaStore's support for asynchronous communications largely obviates that issue because a customer can use a less expensive link, and the system's huge cache can assure data is replicated properly during peak time periods.

Boasting an upper limit of 32 petabytes of external storage, TagmaStore places a new ceiling on the capacity of a single storage system, though observers say that upper limit has yet to be tested from an implementation standpoint. TagmaStore is the successor to Hitachi's Lightning platform. OEM partners HP and Sun concurrently launched their own high-end storage systems based on TagmaStore, the XP12000 and StorEdge 9990 respectively. All three vendors played up the system's support for virtualization (or storage pooling), logical partitioning and universal replication.

"This is an incredibly scalable system," said Tony Asaro, an analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, whose firm has tested the system. Based on what Hitachi called its third-generation massively parallel crossbar switch architecture, USP combines hardware and software that embeds a virtualization layer that effectively can manage the 32 PB of either internal or external storage.

The USP supports 2 million I/O operations per second, cached bandwidth of 68 GBps, 256 concurrent memory operations, 332 TB of internal storage and support for up to 192 Fibre Channel ports.

While HDS has struggled to gain market share with its Lightning platform, the company is poised to gain 2 percentage to 3 percentage points of market share thanks to the performance, partitioning, replication and virtualization capabilities of the system, said Merrill Lynch enterprise storage analyst Shebly Seyrafi (while Merrill Lynch does not own shares in Hitachi, it does have an investment banking relationship with the company). Years ago, HDS would have gained upwards of 8 percent to 10 percent of share with such a leap in performance, Seyrafi said. HDS has its key rival to thank for increasing its barrier-to-market share growth. "EMC has built a better product than it has in the past," he said, referring to the improved software and bus architecture in its Symmetrix 6.

But HDS' Roberson, said demand for TagmaStore appears strong, and he's confident the company will gain share. "We do expect this product to gain market share and increase our rate of revenue growth at the enterprise," Roberson said.

Scott Genereux, HDS' senior vice president of global marketing and channels, said TagmaStore's ability to create virtual storage pools and replicate in multiple vendors' environments (that capability will be forthcoming by year's end) is suited for VARs looking to architect storage solutions and offer professional services rather than those looking to purely sell boxes. "Now, there's a storage platform that really allows them to configure it based on the customers' needs," Genereux said. "It's a huge value proposition for our resellers."

The virtualization capability is provided via Hitachi's Universal Volume Manager, which provides the embedded pooling of both the internal and external storage. Utilizing a function called Volume Migration, the Universal Volume Manager allows for policy-based data life-cycle management across multiple tiers of storage.

TagmaStore also implements Hitachi's The Virtual Partition Manager software utilized in Hitachi Ltd.'s mainframe-class servers, which allocates all storage resources including ports, cache and disk into what Hitachi calls private virtual storage machines. The partitions can be dynamically allocated and modified based on quality of service and business requirements.

The test of TagmaStore's acceptance as a heterogeneous storage-virtualization platform will be less technical and more political among customers, said ESG analyst Asaro. The challenge for HDS and its partners will be to demonstrate significant return on investment, upwards of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, he said. "When that starts happening," he said, "then they'll see an increase in market share."