HDS Announces Storage Command Suite

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation ushered in a new wave in storage resource management, with the introduction of the industry’s fastest, most reliable and simple-to-use unified portfolio of highly-advanced storage management software solutions. The next-generation Hitachi Storage Command Suite is uniquely architected to combine advanced data management and protection capabilities in a simple, centralized interface, which provides the foundation for customers to achieve significant improvements in operational efficiency and business resilience throughout the enterprise.

“Hitachi continues to pave the way for high-end enterprise storage innovation in a big way through the unique ability to integrate the highest levels of hardware and software sophistication,” said Sean Moser, senior director, Global Software Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. “The combination of the Hitachi USP V and Hitachi Storage Command Suite provides a comprehensive services oriented approach to storage management, which makes it generations ahead of any competitor product in the market today. The differentiated value customers can achieve by being able to assimilate all of their heterogeneous storage assets into a unified pool, as opposed to disparate islands of storage, is tremendous.”

The Hitachi Storage Command Suite consists of integrated software tools which help customers more easily manage their storage infrastructure and protect their block, file, and content data assets. This is particularly critical as storage environments are quickly growing more complex and robust enterprise applications are introduced frequently across multiple business units with corresponding, stringent service-level agreements (SLAs). As a result of the rapid growth of data stored across multiple distributed and multi-vendor storage infrastructures, organizations are challenged with growing risk and costs associated with application availability, performance and data recoverability.

Supporting Hitachi’s Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy which leverages the company’s market-leading virtualization technology, the Hitachi Storage Command Suite provides much needed pain relief to these pressing challenges by delivering non-disruptive data mobility, advanced replication and tiered storage management services across heterogeneous file, object and block-based storage assets—thereby dramatically reducing the overall risk and costs that are commonly associated with storage management. The Hitachi Storage Command Suite provides application-centric capacity and performance management spanning the entire storage infrastructure, as well as fine tuned delivery of storage system performance, availability, recoverability and functionality, in a way that seamlessly aligns to the vital business requirements of customers.

“As storage capacity demands rise exponentially, managing IT risk, controlling costs, and maximizing IT assets and capabilities are essential enablers of successful and profitable business operations,” said Laura DuBois, program director, Storage Software, IDC. “Integrated suites of storage and replication management software represent an evolution in this market space. Enterprises that deploy integrated solutions, such as the Hitachi Storage Command Suite, will be better able to maximize efficiencies within their storage infrastructure. Improved storage economics are achieved by enabling storage administrators to manage a greater amount of capacity per person. This, combined with a comprehensive IT risk management and data protection strategy, creates a powerful arsenal that goes beyond simply protecting data.”

Introducing the Hitachi Storage Command Suite
With today’s announcements of the Hitachi Storage Command Suite and the enhancements to the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and Universal Storage Platform VM, Hitachi is once again delivering customers more measurable value on an integrated services oriented storage platform—a unique advantage over competitors. Today, Hitachi is introducing new and improved software management services that synergistically complement the enhanced Universal Storage Platform V family, including the new Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software (see separate press release).

The new Hitachi Storage Command Suite includes:

• Hitachi Replication Manager is a new software tool for management, consolidation and simplification of replication operations. This new tool provides customers with the ability to better manage their Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) for both mainframe and open systems environments. This allows organizations to better protect an ever growing volume of data assets and improve their operational resiliency.
• Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter is a critical new software solution that delivers storage array, host and application-level storage capacity reporting across heterogeneous storage systems, without the need for host agents. It features rich reporting capabilities including both current and historical capacity views, forecasting and predictive analysis, and custom reporting capabilities. With improved custom storage capacity reporting, customers will have a clear view of how storage capacity is used in order to optimize storage utilization.
• Hitachi Device Manager is a core component of the new Storage Command Suite that provides a common framework for configuring and provisioning storage on Hitachi storage systems and virtualized external storage. Customers will benefit from powerful, flexible management and reporting tools that help them efficiently manage the ever-increasing volumes of storage.
• Hitachi Tuning Manager is an automated, intelligent and path-aware storage resource management tool that maps, monitors, analyzes and reviews storage network resources from the application to the storage device. Re-architected for vastly improved scalability, flexibility and usability, Hitachi Tuning Manager software allows storage administrators to troubleshoot performance problems, enables alerts to proactively identify potential problems before they occur, and forecasts storage requirements to meet service-level agreements.
• Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager enables the non-disruptive movement of data volumes to match application quality of service requirements through an easy-to-use interface. Designed to enhance and streamline data migration by integrating the provisioning process, this allows for simplified tiered storage management functions. Customers benefit from being able to quickly, easily and non-disruptively match application requirements and priorities to the appropriate tier of storage, based on cost and performance.
• Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager Advanced protects critical data against various types of failure, including hard disk drive, and other hardware and logical failures. With improved load balancing, path failover, and recovery capabilities to additional operating system platforms, customers benefit from improved availability and reliability while optimizing performance of their storage infrastructures.

“Little is said about how easy or hard it can be for storage administrators to manage their storage resource management tools,” said John Webster, principal IT advisor, Illuminata. “Administrators are in a bind when they are being managed by the management applications, as can be the case when they are complex and rely on repetitive, manual process. With the Hitachi Storage Command Suite, much has been done to reduce the proliferation of application host-based monitoring and reporting agents, and to replace archaic command line interfaces with a powerful, integrated management software platform.”