Hitachi Data Systems Maximizes Efficiency of VMware Environments With Support for VMware vSphere 5

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT)(TSE:6501), today announced integration with the new VMware vSphere® 5 and cloud infrastructure suite to help customers optimize and scale their IT infrastructures and accelerate their cloud deployments. New Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 family support for VMware vSphere 5 will leverage reliable, high-performance storage array technology for greater virtual machine (VM) density, flexibility, efficiency and performance in VMware vSphere environments. In addition, with Hitachi VSP, customers can extend the full features and benefits of VMware vSphere 5 to external, third-party storage arrays. This unique capability enables customers to further reduce IT costs by protecting their existing investments.

To fully realize the promise of their private or public cloud investments, customers and service providers will require a fully virtualized IT infrastructure to achieve scale and agility while lowering costs. As more applications are virtualized and the scale of deployments grows, storage plays an increasingly critical role in virtualized server environments. Hitachi VSP and Hitachi AMS provide a truly integrated foundation for growing VMware environments, giving customers unparalleled levels of flexibility and scalability.

“Hitachi Data Systems and VMware share the vision that virtualization is the foundational technology for cloud infrastructure and cloud computing,” said Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer, Hitachi Data Systems. “Being among the first vendors planning to integrate with VMware vSphere 5, HDS will ensure customers can continue to realize the maximum value from their VMware environments as deployments scale. The feature set of Hitachi storage platforms is ideal for virtual environments, providing customers with a foundation to flexibly and cost-effectively operate their data centers or private cloud infrastructures.”

“Integration with VMware vSphere 5 will have important benefits to customers, helping enterprises operate with greater efficiency and agility, while simultaneously laying the foundation for cloud infrastructures,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. “Hitachi Data Systems has been a valued, trusted technology alliance partner, and together, we will continue to help customers deliver adaptive, high-performing, and reliable IT services.”

Hitachi Technologies for VMware Cloud Infrastructure Environments

Hitachi VSP has the external storage virtualization capability necessary to address customers’ top business needs to optimize application performance and reduce IT costs. The unique Hitachi VSP 3D scaling architecture will allow customers to scale up, out and deep to extend VMware vSphere 5 and its new features including all new VMware vSphere Storage API integration, to third-party storage arrays for improved VM density, scalability and virtualized application performance.

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) allows organizations to create a storage pool from which capacity can be used on-demand to improve application performance and capacity utilization. Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT) simplifies storage administration, ensures predictable performance and reduces costs in a tiered storage environment. Hitachi VSP, with the industry’s highest reliability and performance, provides the ideal platform for virtualizing Tier 1 applications. Customers can take advantage of enterprise-class reliability, availability and performance with large HDP and HDT pools, and use multiple tiers of disk in Hitachi VSP. Through automation, HDT better aligns storage tiers with business needs by eliminating the complexity of managing multiple tiers and moving data around. HDS integration with VMware vSphere 5 will include the following:

• VMware vSphere Storage Virtual Machine File Systems (VMFS): Offers improved virtual machine scalability and performance and allows customers to maximize its benefits when use with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering.
• Support for more than 2TB with LUN: Provides support for more than 2TB with LUN for VMFS data stores. As customers look to simplify their storage provisioning, with HDP and HDT, they will be able to non-disruptively provision large VMFS data stores up to 60TB with more agility and efficiency, without sacrificing application performance. This will enable customers to take full advantage of the array’s capabilities to expand their use of VMs beyond test and development applications and virtualize their tier one applications.
• VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration: In addition to an existing VAAI feature that offloads processing to storage arrays to make VMs and server cycles more available, the new version offers additional features with the ability to reclaim blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted and thin provisioning pool full alerts. When used in conjunction with HDS hardware accelerated thin provisioning, customers will benefit from even tighter VMware alignment in environments with thin provisioning.
• VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness: vSphere 5 includes a new API to provide storage array information for VMware vCenter Server. This new API integration will provide VMware vSphere 5 the ability to use advanced functions for policy-based storage management and Storage DRS for overall better VM performance and I/O load balancing.
• VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5: Provides hardware accelerated array-based replication, with tight VM integration and advanced disaster recovery planning, testing and failover features. New data center “re-protect” capabilities will allow increased VM integration while maximizing the advantage of powerful replication capabilities within Hitachi TrueCopy® and Hitachi Universal Replicator. When coupled with Hitachi storage virtualization, these technologies can be extended to third party storage arrays with failover consistency across the data center and a single point of management.

Hitachi Data Systems Partnership with VMware

The integration between Hitachi VSP, Hitachi AMS and VMware vSphere 5 will be an important enhancement to the evolving relationship between Hitachi and VMware. Since 2002, Hitachi Data Systems and VMware have delivered innovative, end-to-end virtualization for storage consolidation, backup and archiving, business continuity and storage management.

As the leader in storage virtualization and an Elite-level partner in the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program, HDS uniquely bridges the gap between server and storage infrastructures in customers' data centers and help customers optimize the operational efficiency and resiliency of their IT environments to achieve significant cost savings.

HDS Optimized Solutions for Virtualized Environments at VMworld® 2011

Attendees of VMworld 2011 can experience the full technical capabilities and customer benefits of integration between HDS and VMware technologies, including Hitachi VSP and Hitachi AMS integration with VMware vSphere 5, in HDS booth #533 at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, August 29 through September 1. For more information on VMworld, visit: www.vmworld.com.

Web Resources

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About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer ROI, unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. With a vision that IT must be virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. With more than 4,700 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Hitachi Data Systems products, services and solutions are trusted by the world’s leading enterprises, including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 and more than 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100. Hitachi Data Systems believes that data drives our world – and information is the new currency. To learn more, visit: http://www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2010 (ended March 31, 2011) consolidated revenues totaled 9,315 billion yen ($112.2 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2011. All Rights Reserved. Hitachi is a registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Hitachi Data Systems is a registered trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. in the United States and other countries.

VMware, VMware vCenter, VMware vSphere and VMworld are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.