Bolstering its high-end storage virtualization market leadership, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced that Hitachi, Ltd. has shipped more than 4,500 intelligent virtual storage controllers worldwide, outpacing competitors still attempting to gain a foothold in this critical market. By being the first and only major vendor to implement storage controller-based virtualization, Hitachi created a new category with its ability to provide advanced storage, data and content services for externally attached arrays.

The revolutionary Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and its rack-mounted variant, the Network Storage Controller, continue to represent the pinnacle of high-end, enterprise storage systems and large-scale storage virtualization solutions available in the industry today.

The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform continues to change the industry dynamics of data storage by powering an embedded virtualization layer capable of managing up to 32 petabytes of internal and external storage, logical partitions for the creation of secure Private Virtual Storage Machines, and sophisticated storage-agnostic remote copy that greatly simplifies business continuity—driving continued market share gains that have positioned Hitachi at the forefront of storage virtualization.

“Hitachi is enabling customers to work with a safe, stable platform that they already trust and are familiar with—an intelligent storage controller,” said Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer, Hitachi Data Systems. “CIOs don’t want to worry about another device and yet another layer of management sitting in the middle of the network in front of their storage systems. Network-based virtualization products' access to physical volumes is based on managing an extent level mapping table in a device on the network. These mapping tables create vendor lock-in and an exposure to losing data. In Hitachi’s controller-based solution, external storage data is presented in cache for processing and then stored back so that the extent mapping is contained with the data on the external device and not in the network, which is the case with some vendors’ virtualization appliances. In fact, Hitachi’s solution has no dependence on the network and can support direct attach, mainframe attach, and LAN/WAN attach. Based on our superior design, we have provided our customers with a massively parallel storage controller architecture that enables virtualization by simply turning the feature on. It’s really been a simple choice for our customers.”