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Industry’s Only 3D Scaling Platform Helps Customers Maximize Performance, Improve Scalability and Provide Investment Protection for VMware Environments
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), today announced VMware? vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) support on Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). Through the platform’s unique 3D scaling architecture, Hitachi Data Systems can extend this capability to more than 100 virtualized multivendor storage arrays. Hitachi VSP provides a truly integrated foundation for growing VMware environments, giving customers the flexibility and scalability they need while protecting existing investments.
“Hitachi Data Systems has the external storage virtualization necessary to address our customers’ top business needs to optimize application performance and reduce IT costs,” said Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. “Competitive approaches require customers to ‘rip and replace’ existing infrastructures and go through the painstaking process of migrating hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines to benefit from VAAI. The 3D scaling architecture of Hitachi VSP allows customers to scale up, out and deep to take immediate benefit of VAAI to improve virtual machine density, scalability and virtualized application performance.”
"As the world leader in storage virtualization, it is essential that Hitachi Data Systems lead the way in providing full VAAI support for virtualized storage. This means that our customers will benefit from increased flexibility and scalability, which will enable their businesses to be more agile and competitive. VMware's server virtualization is becoming increasingly popular in many markets, and many customers hope to derive true benefits by marrying both server and storage virtualization. It is therefore important that Hitachi VSP, the leading storage platform, offers full VAAI support for heterogeneous storage,” said Ravi Rajendran, HDS Vice President and General Manager, ASEAN.
In a January 2011 CIO Peer2Peer Research Panel poll, 97 percent of respondents indicated they were investing in server virtualization projects and more than 50 percent said they planned to initiate storage virtualization projects over the next 12 months. The number one reason given to support the move to more virtualization-focused initiatives was the need to remedy existing storage and server resource inefficiencies. Hitachi VSP is the only solution available today that cost-effectively solves these challenges. Hitachi VSP provides full VAAI support, including:
Full Copy: speeds up virtual machine cloning and Storage vMotion in the storage system by up to 18 percent by enabling the storage arrays to make full copies of data within the array
Write Same (Block Zeroing): speeds up provisioning of new virtual machines by up to 85 percent by eliminating the need to write zero formats, immediately removing previously deleted blocks and increasing the space efficiency of the system
Hardware Assisted Locking (SCSI Reservation Lock): enables faster locking and improves virtual machine density and performance by up to 35 percent by removing SCSI reservation conflicts
“HDS has leveraged VAAI to set a benchmark for scale and performance through the tight integration of server and storage virtualization,” said Ed Lenta, General Manager, VMware ASEAN. “This helps enterprises and service providers do more storage tasks with significantly less time, less CPU power and less network traffic. As the industry transforms its data centers to enable public, private and hybrid clouds, this scalability is essential to address emerging cloud systems with thousands of virtual machines and huge storage arrays.”
“VAAI is key in enabling the next wave of VMware adoption," said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Hitachi's support for VAAI in a heterogeneous storage environments will help customers accelerate virtualization deployments as they wrestle with production applications and are held hostage by the manual configuration, sizing, and performance challenges.”
Hitachi VSP 3D scaling, dynamic tiered storage and tight integration with VMware vSphere? provide an ideal IT platform for VMware and cloud environments. Hitachi VSP addresses the challenges of server virtualization as these environments scale, enabling customers to:
Achieve the highest performance and virtual machine density for virtualized applications in production environments
Automate and consolidate tiered storage assets while ensuring the highest levels of reliability, performance and availability
Simplify and unify storage management to maximize IT resources, and importantly, reduce IT costs and minimize risk
Scale to support large-scale virtualized application environments, including VDI
Building upon its July 2010 announcement of Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) family support for VMware vSphere 4.1, Hitachi Data Systems now offers fully certified virtualized storage with VMware VAAI. . 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 program, HDS uniquely bridges the gap between server and storage infrastructures in customers' data centers and helps customers optimize the operational efficiency and resiliency of their IT environments to achieve significant cost savings.
AvailabilityHitachi VSP support for VAAI is available worldwide. VMware VAAI is supported on VMware vSphere 4.1 and later.
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