News

posted on 19 May 2008 08:19

Hitachi Data Systems has added new drive support to its high-end USP-V array, added replication of thinly-provisioned volumes, and consolidated the management of replication activities and data. It is the second mainstream array vendor to add flash solid state drive (SSD) support.

The Universal Storage Processor - Virtual (USP-V) supports 400GB 10,000rpm Fibre Channel drives, up from the previous 300GB maximum. There can be 332 of these, so capacity at this level has increased by 33.2TB.

The USP-V also adds support for 1TB SATA drives, up from the previous 750GB limit. The maximum raw SATA capacity is now 1,152TB.

The USP-V cache has increased to 512GB from the current maximum of 256GB.

The USP-V and USP-VM (modular version for SMEs) will both support the IPv6 protocol for increased Internet addressing. Solid state drive (SSD) support will be added to the USP-V later this year, following EMC's lead with its Symmetrix DMX-4 support for flash SSDs earlier this year. It is not known which flash SSD supplier HDS will use.

Hitachi is consolidating all data replication activities into a Hitachi Replication Manager product. Thinly-provisioned disk volumes - Dynamic Provisioning in HDS parlance - can now be replicated, either asynchronously or synchronously, and either locally or remotely by using Hitachi Universal Replicator or Hitachi True Copy.

Previously all allocated blocks would be replicated, including empty ones. Now only the thinly provisioned 42MB pages are replicated, saving network bandwidth and time. This applies to both the USP-V and USP-VM. Since they thinly provision both Hitachi and 3rd party storage arrays behind the controller this means that the USPs V and VM can replicate thinly provisioned volumes from any storage array connected to the USP V and VM to any storage array connected to another USP V and VM.

New Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter software reports storage capacity at the drive level and can also report on how storage capacity server applications have or how much all applications in a server have. It includes historical trending information and can estimate likely usage in the future.

There is a new version of Hitachi's Storage Command Suite, version 6.0, which includes these new software features.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}

^{See hardware and thin provisioning release here.}

^{See additional software information here.}