The storage supplier promises thin provisioning with heterogeneous storage

Hitachi Data Systems on Monday unveiled the Universal Storage Platform V series, a single device that the company says offers a complete, multi-purpose storage environment that can be run off a single electrical outlet.

Aimed at smaller enterprises, it packages and delivers common storage services such as virtualisation, thin provisioning and business continuity across heterogeneous storage assets, the company says.

HDS introduced a rack-mounted storage services platform with heterogeneous storage services, including Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software, Hitachi Universal Volume Manager (with support for up to 96 petabytes of virtualised storage), large logical storage pools and a new, enhanced massively parallel crossbar switch architecture. This will use 4Gbps fibre channel "end-to-end" and a switched fibre channel architecture on the back-end.

Other features include Dynamic Provisioning software, with support for both internal and externally virtualised storage. Support for external storage will come in the autumn of this year, the company said.

The Universal Storage Platform Virtual Machine (USP VM) at the heart of the storage platform can connect, virtualise and thin-provision storage from any vendor, said Bob Plumridge, director of software for HDS in Europe. He said that it replaces HDS's NSC55, which did not support thin provisioning — the ability to share a single storage pool among multiple services.

"We have been able to offer thin-provisioning, but only in the high-end systems. Now we can offer it in the mid-range," he told ZDNet.co.uk.

He also stressed that the USP VM will run as a standalone device. "We can offer virtualisation, thin provisioning and the other benefits to customers who just want to use their own storage that they have now," he said. "We see this as a real opportunity for companies to take advantage of virualisation and so on."

Although it is aimed at the mid-range, the USP VM will cost $60,000 (£30,000) for the basic system without any disk storage.

HDS does not see any problem in forging close ties with the leading virtualisation supplier, VMware, when that company is owned by HDS's rival for high-end storage, EMC.

"This has been a great opportunity to forge close links with VMware," Plumridge said. "We have a very good relationship with VMware. EMC maintains that it is a separate company and in our experience it is."

He believes that the big driver behind virtualiation and thin-provisioning is the move to the "green", energy-efficient data centre. "Everybody understands that need now, and companies have to look at ways to make their operations more efficient,"" he said.

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