HDS Universal Storage Platform V and VM Compatible With IBM GDPS

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced that the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform (USP) V and VM are now certified with IBM’s Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) system solution.

"Hitachi consistently strives to support the latest mainframe environments in order to provide our customers and partners with additional resources for their mission-critical applications," said Roberto Basilio, vice president, Storage Platforms Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. "By completing the qualification testing, we continue to grow our partnership with IBM, in addition to reducing cost, complexity and risk for our end-users. The qualification testing is a rigorous process and a testament to the superiority of the Hitachi USP V and VM."

"Today’s announcement of the testing completion is a significant result for customers when evaluating storage solutions to effectively consolidate and manage the optimized storage solutions on mainframe environments," said Shuji Sugimoto, general manager, Storage Systems Development, Disk Array Systems Division, Hitachi, Ltd. "With the increasing prevalence of heterogeneous storage environments, true interoperability is more important than ever. We are pleased to continue our collaboration with IBM to provide our mutual customers reliable disk storage systems and reduce complexity."

Interoperability with IBM servers is a mandatory requirement for mainframe users. Many of the world’s largest organizations in the financial services, telecommunications and other key industries rely on IBM mainframe systems to run mission-critical applications.

Compatibility and interoperability certification with IBM’s GDPS system now allows customers to mix Hitachi storage and IBM storage in the mainframe environment to deliver the performance, reliability and availability they expect for the most demanding applications. Additionally, interoperability support from Hitachi offers customers an end-to-end solution designed to improve their mainframe environments. Hitachi’s approach enables customers to deliver centrally managed storage services such as business continuity, hierarchical storage management, data migration and enhanced disaster recovery solutions, as opposed to utilizing multiple isolated islands of storage to perform similar functions.

The testing of Hitachi’s Enterprise System Connection’ (ESCON), Fiber Connection (FICON) and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) connectivity for select configurations of IBM GDPS was also included.

As a result of successful completion of compatibility and interoperability testing, a Letter of Qualification was issued by IBM.