In an effort to boost its presence in storage virtualization industry, Hitachi Data System has brought forth a powerful virtual storage platform.

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform was presented by the company at the Bangalore Hitachi Information Forum.

This new tool is expected to show new virtualization levels and much better performance than all previous platforms. This VSP is designed for storing all types of data, and it is the first 3D scaling platform the industry has ever come up with.

Randy DeMont, Executive Vice President of Hitachi Data Systems, said that today, in the days of budgets running low, competition growing tough and data growing 50 percent each year, companies need the fastest, most secure and most available information and at the lowest cost ever. He said that the new platform would be the solution, because it offered an ultimately new method of transforming raw data into viable information.

Getting back to the data growth issue, unstructured data, which includes audio, video, images, emails, etc., appears to be growing 10 times faster than structured data. In some spheres, the amount of data grows three to five times each year, and hence the increase in operational expenses. In a situation like this, the idea of boosting storage or processor capacity appears to be obsolete.

The Virtual Storage Platform uses the highly economical tiered storage and reclamation technique, which reduces disk drive cost significantly. It is supposed to replace the HDS Universal Storage Platform V. Although the VSP is built on the same pattern as the USP, it has some new features. It uses Intel processors instead of Fibre Channel (FC) drives and has twice the scalability of the USP with less footprint required. This is due to the use of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, SAS and SATA in combination. The VSP is going to work in combination with the Hitachi Command Suite, which is actually an updated version of the Hitachi Storage Command Suite. All this, Hitachi officials say, will help customers reduce TCO by more than 30 percent shortly after the platform is incorporated.