 "Hitachi Eyes HPC Storage Market")
In a bid to assume prominence in the global high-performance computing (HPC) storage space, Hitachi Data Systems has announced the immediate availability of a new NAS Platform. Additionally, it has also struck a five-year global OEM agreement with network storage vendor BlueArc.
According to Hitachi, the new High-performance NAS Platform offers more performance, capacity, file system size, and snapshot replicas than any comparative file-based storage offering.
With features such as the ability to perform data classification and hierarchical storage management and transparent data migration, the Hitachi NAS Platform claims to deliver superior results than competing offerings such as EMC’s Celerra/NSX and NetApp’s FAS and V series products.
“With this announcement, we are introducing the most advanced file and block virtualization system today,” said John Mansfield, vice president, Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems.
“There is tremendous opportunity for the Hitachi High-performance NAS Platform with our installed base. Our customers have been anxious for us to do for their file storage systems what we have successfully done for their block storage systems with our Universal Storage Platform. We can now help them consolidate and virtualize a tiered storage block and file-based environment.”
The platform’s single logical storage pool of up to 512 terabytes is said to eliminate the need to break up large data sets while its file virtualization capabilities are said to enable automatic growth of file systems.
The NAS Platform also promises to deliver a cluster name space, which provides a single unified name space to users for both CIFS and NFS, concurrently, giving administrators a single mount point for users no matter where they physically reside.
Besides the NAS offering, Hitachi’s agreement with BlueArc is expected to expand its addressable market and bring powerful file-intensive storage technology to customers in the high- performance computing markets.
“BlueArc’s file-based virtualization technology is a perfect complement to Hitachi’s block-based virtualization solutions and this partnership will help expand BlueArc’s presence on a global basis and will extend our reach beyond key vertical markets we serve today to major enterprises and horizontal applications across the world,” commented Mike Gustafson, president and CEO, BlueArc.