Christophe's Corner

Today, Hitachi Data Systems made a significant strategic announcement around end to end (E2E) server-to-storage virtualization, recognizing the critical role virtualization will play across the data center going forward.

We also announced two innovative business continuity and disaster recovery solutions – Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V and Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter 2 for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager – to support this announcement. More on the Hyper-V Solution in a minute.

So – why E2E virtualization? It’s as simple as this: Separately, server virtualization and storage virtualization have clear operational and capital benefits. But when they are combined, the benefits – the efficiencies – have the potential to be that much greater. In fact, it should be a case of their value being greater than the sum of their parts.

While other vendors may be storage virtualization players, Hitachi is the proven market leader by a long shot (despite what other vendors may say). Hitachi has more than 11,000 storage virtualization systems installed – so we speak from experience. We aren’t just storage virtualization providers, we are innovators. Also, we’re server virtualization neutral, which means we’re all about choice. We believe in giving customers the flexibility to choose from a variety of solutions/technologies to meet their specific business, IT and budget needs.

"Other Vendor"

We’re seeing it with customers, in the press and research, one of the benefits of virtualization is in enhancing the ability to provide Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. BC/DR is important in any market climate, but in today’s tough economic climate, it’s downright essential.

In the case of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, E2E virtualization can help organizations optimize performance, minimize planned and unplanned downtime (i.e., improve recovery point and recovery time objectives) and, importantly, extend data protection to additional applications and data types. This is especially true if organizations are equipped with the proper toolset – a Hitachi toolset. Hitachi offers the right mix of hardware and software platforms to help organizations – medium to enterprise in scale – optimize business continuity and disaster recovery.

Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V extends the benefits of Microsoft Quick and Live Migration capabilities functionalities to geographically dispersed sites; in other words, it extends organizations protection capabilities way outside the data center to protect against a wide-scale disaster, and importantly provides industry differentiated automated fail over and data resynchronization. The Solution can also be used to protect sites locally or within the same metropolitan area. In other words, it can be a business continuity and disaster recovery solution, depending on customer, or more specifically application/data, requirements.

For more information about the other cool features and benefits of the new Solution, check out these pages, here and here. Also, check out Hu’s Blog for more on the subject of end-to-end virtualization.