Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems Acquires BlueArc In All-Cash Deal

September 13, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, has acquired BlueArc Corporation, a provider of scalable, high performance network storage solutions.

Building upon a successful 5 year OEM partnership, Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc will give customers the combination of Hitachi quality, reliability and support with innovative, highly scalable, high performance BlueArc network attached storage (NAS).

Hitachi Data Systems completed the acquisition of all outstanding shares of BlueArc in an all-cash transaction.

Wells Fargo Securities was the exclusive financial advisor to Hitachi Data Systems.

BofA Merrill Lynch acted as financial advisor and Credit Suisse as a co-advisor to BlueArc for this transaction.

HDS Comes Out With Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V

May 12, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Hitachi and provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced the availability of Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V, a new business continuity and disaster recovery solution for virtualized environments based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.The solution combines Microsoft Windows Server 2008 capabilities such as high availability through Microsoft Multipath I/O, server virtualization and clustering with the proven platform capabilities of Hitachi storage virtualization and system-based replication to create a cost effective, highly available and remotely replicated virtual server infrastructure for organizations looking to reduce business risk and associated downtime costs.

Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V extends Microsoft migration capabilities to remote sites, allowing midrange to enterprise customers to replicate and migrate virtual machines within virtualized environments either locally or across geographically dispersed sites. The solution also features breakthrough automated failover and data resynchronization, as well as simplified failback of virtual machines. Additionally, organizations looking to optimize business continuity can use the quick and live migration capabilities of Windows Server for local protection of virtual machines.

According to a recent report by Enterprise Strategy Group, an estimated 85 percent of organizations who suffer a major disaster and do not have a viable business continuity or disaster recovery solution in place are either out of business one year after the disaster or suffer huge financial losses. In addition to the many benefits that server and storage virtualization can provide separately such as consolidation, improved resource utilization, and improved performance, Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V can help organizations reduce downtime and improve data availability, which have important risk-reduction and cost savings implications.

Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V is immediately available through Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS).

Hitachi Data Systems Introduces New Replication Support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

April 16, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, today announced the immediate availability of the second generation of Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Today’s announcement adds support for the midrange Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage family, providing customers continuous, real time local and remote replication and automatic failover capabilities to ensure resilient data protection, high availability and disaster recovery for VMware environments.

As more businesses implement VMware virtualization, they need to ensure that the data generated in this virtual environment is properly protected. At the same time, businesses are discovering that traditional approaches to disaster recovery and business continuity are not as cost-effective in virtual environments. To address these pressing customer challenges to ensure greater uptime at lower operational costs, the Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter facilitates the linkage between Hitachi market leading system-based replication technologies, including Hitachi Universal Replicator, Hitachi TrueCopy Synchronous, Hitachi TrueCopy Extended Distance and Hitachi ShadowImage in-system replication software, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Coupled together, these software solutions provide operational resilience, robust data protection, recovery management and replication capabilities optimized for VMware Infrastructure.

The Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter links Hitachi replication software and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to provide tremendous operational resilience, robust data protection, and recovery management and replication capabilities that complement VMware Infrastructure.

Hitachi Moves Forward With Virtage Embedded Virtualization

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hitachi yesterday announced that it would add Intel’s 9100 series Itanium chips to its high-end BladeSymphony 1000 systems, as well as its lower-end BladeSymphony 320 servers. Additionally, Hitachi will begin offering the latest dual-core Intel Xeon 5200 series processors along with Intel’s quad-core Xeon 5400 chips with both sets of BladeSymphony systems.

Hitachi is looking to leverage its legacy mainframe technology, especially virtualization, to offer an alternative in a crowded field that is full of systems aimed at data center consolidation projects.

What Hitachi is offering is called Virtage, an embedded hardware virtualization technology that provides an abstraction layer that decouples the physical system from the operating system to provide utilization and additional flexibility. Since the virtualization is built into the hardware itself, it is more reliable and secure than virtualization based on a hypervisor, according to Hitachi.

Hitachi doesn’t have a lot of market share though. In the latest survey by IDC (confirmed by Gartner as well), HP was first in overall server revenue with more than $3.7 billion in global sales, and the company also controlled 46.9 percent of the worldwide $1.2 billion blade market during the first quarter of 2008.

Meanwhile, Hitachi did not finish in either the top five in the United States or in the worldwide market, where HP, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens all dominate.

[Source: eWeek]

VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Released

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware has announced its new tool for disaster recovery management and automation of a virtual infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0 (build 97878).

VMware SRM 1.0 is part of VMware’s suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery.

“Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. “With the delivery of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware removes hurdles associated with disaster recovery planning and implementation. Through our innovative disaster recovery testing, management, and automation capabilities, we bring predictability back into the hands of IT and help eliminate risks associated with human error.”

Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides:

Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter.
Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.
Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

VMware’s parent company, EMC, is one of the first vendors to officially announce support for Site Recovery Manager. Other vendors showing support for the product include 3Par, Dell, FalconStor Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, LeftHand Networks, and NetApp.

Pricing for Site Recovery Manager is based on the number of processors in the servers. SRM can be purchased as a standalone product or purchased as part of VMware’s Management and Automation Bundle which includes two-processor versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager. There’s also a trial version available for download.

Hitachi elbows into the Virtualization Game

December 6, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware, Xen and Microsoft Look Out!

Jave Developer’s Journal reports that Hitachi is claiming to have a mainframe-derived firmware approach to virtualization that’s better than VMware or Xen or Microsoft.

The approach has been built into a new species of Hitachi’s blade servers called BladeSymphony with Virtage, Virtage being the so-called “breakthrough” embedded widgetry that bakes virtualization into the hardware as an alternative to third-party virtualization software.

Virtage

Being firmware, Hitachi says, Virtage can decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance. The box runs both Windows and Linux.

IDC group VP Vernon Turner, the head of the researcher’s Enterprise Computing practice, says BladeSymphony with Virtage is a “leap ahead in the virtualization game” and will fuel the proliferation of blades.

The machine has been out in Japan since August. Hitachi America Ltd, the company’s year-old server unit, will start offering the Itanium version of the box here in January. The company is wholly unclear when it will have an advertised Xeon unit and be able to mix and match Xeon and Itanium blades in the same chassis.

…As an Intel account, Virtage exploits Intel’s VT extensions in Itanium and Woodcrest. Applications never have to be changed to be virtualized, it said, like they sometimes have to be with VMware. …Hitachi claims the BladeSymphony server is the industry’s first real enterprise-class mission-critical blade server and Hitachi chief systems architect Paul Figliozzi says the box deserves that distinction because of its multi-blade SMP interconnect architecture, hot-swap capabilities, high performance, 16 PCI slots and native virtualization.

Hitachi positions it as the place to consolidate all three data center tiers – the edge, the application and the database – into a single chassis and hence lower TCO. Hitachi marketing VP Steve Campbell says that for rival IBM to do that would take a combination of both Intel servers and p Series iron for the back-end, a less elegant solution that takes up more real estate.

BladeSymphony’s SMP architecture lets up to four blades be lashed together into a single system. Since the 10U chassis holds eight blades altogether that’s two 16-way SMP systems to a chassis. Each Itanium blade holds two dual-core processors for a total of 32 cores per chassis, reducing footprint and power consumption.

Hitachi has been peddling the BladeSymphony line for the last two years and owns 20% of Japanese blade market.