Hitachi Data Systems on Monday upgraded its high-end TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, boosting performance and adding new functionality for disaster recovery and security.
HDS, which claims a 40 percent market share and an installed base of more than 3,000 for the TagmaStore, boosted performance by 25 percent to 2.5 million IOPS.
The upgraded USP offers multi-protocol consolidation of iSCSI, Fibre Channel, ESCON, FICON and NAS within a single storage services platform and management console.
Hitachi Universal Replicator long-distance replication software can now accommodate larger configurations with higher performance, including support for 64K data volumes distributed across as many as four USP systems, and new Universal Replicator Delta Resynch capability lets customers recover to a local or intermediate site when the primary site has failed in a three data center configuration.
The new function will copy only the delta data (differences) from the intermediate site to the remote disaster recovery site during the recovery process instead of performing a copy of all of the data from the intermediate to the remote site.
ShadowImage In-System Replication, which provides high-speed data replication within any Hitachi storage system, now supports an increased number of data volumes, with data replication performance increased by as much as 300 percent, or more than 1 gigabyte per second. Concurrent ShadowImage operations have been increased from 32 to 128.
The platform is also getting a centralized audit log file, which stores a history of all user access operations performed on the system, for tracking all user access operations, monitoring security, investigating the cause of errors, and avoiding potential errors.
Tony Asaro, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, says USP “is still the only enterprise-class storage system that also provides external storage virtualization. It is still the only storage virtualization platform that leverages the same data management software that is also used on its flagship storage system products.”
“Hitachi has elevated their storage subsystem controllers to the status of storage services platforms,” said Data Mobility Group senior analyst and founder John Webster, who singled out such features as logical partitioning, embedded virtualization, virtual ports and heterogeneous replication.
The USP upgrades are free through a non-disruptive microcode update. HDS is also offering a 4Gbps front-end blade for about $100,000.