Hitachi's Big Box Promises More Than PowerHitachi's Big Box Promises More Than Power

What better place than the sophisticated yet raucous Big Apple to unveil a product that's designed to deal well with complexity?

At a press conference in New York's famed Guggenheim Museum, Hitachi Data Systems unveiled its long-awaited TagmaStore storage system that can act as the front-end manager for multiple storage systems from other vendors, including those from EMC and IBM.

The next-generation Hitachi box can conduct 2 million Internet operations per second, run 256 concurrent memory operations, and has 68 Gbytes per second of cache bandwidth.

It also provides virtualization capabilities within the TagmaStore controller, including up to 32 petabytes of virtual capacity that can support as many as 32 different virtual machines from multiple vendors, and Private Virtual Storage Machine capabilities that will ensure that information, such as customer data, stays secure. Finally, Hitachi will deliver logical partitions in the controller that could allow customers to more easily change storage capacity in response to changing application needs.

Hitachi wouldn't comment on price, stating that such multivendor support is unchartered, but executives said the system will be priced competitively. TagmaStore is available now.

An industry analyst attending the press conference said other vendors could catch up to Hitachi's advanced functionality and multivendor support. "But HDS is the one putting a stake in the ground with virtualization to help customers," says John Webster, an analyst and founder at Data Mobility Group. "Customers know they need help because the amount of data is truly busting the seams of current storage systems."