HDS Introduces Three New VTL Appliances

In
the face of increased compliance regulations and rising data protection
requirements, Hitachi Data Systems introduced three new Virtual Tape Library
(VTL) Appliances designed to answer these pressing customer challenges—the
Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 500M, the Virtual Tape Library
Appliance Model 1000L, and the Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model
1000E. This comprehensive portfolio of VTL appliances brings
medium-sized businesses and enterprise customers the fastest and the
most advanced disk-based data protection storage services available in
the market today—eclipsing any other competitive offering in its class.

Organizations of all sizes are often challenged by long, inefficient
and some times faulty backup operations due to the slow process of
writing large amounts of data to tape. In addition, customers are faced
with the expensive costs associated with keeping vast amounts of data
available on their storage systems. Combining the market-leading
ProtecTIER data de-duplication technology from Diligent Technologies
and powerful Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) systems, the new
Virtual Tape Library Appliances deliver the industry’s fastest inline
data de-duplication, while also maintaining 100-percent data integrity.
Furthermore, the Virtual Tape Library Appliances eliminate redundant
data-reducing physical storage needs by up to 25 times or more-and
integrate into existing IT environments seamlessly, thereby preserving
customers’ storage infrastructure investments.

"Inline data de-duplication is a superior approach for industrial
strength backup and recovery relative to post-processing
architectures," said David Floyer, Chief Technical Officer of
ITCentrix, a CIO consultancy. "But the real story is that Hitachi’s
ProtecTIER technology is far more scalable and ready to meet the coming
explosion in data backup requirements than alternative hash-based
approaches. For example, our research indicates that customers using
ProtecTIER to replace tape-based backup will achieve 31 percent greater
savings than best of breed hash-based alternatives."

"With the announcement of Hitachi Data Systems’ new VTL appliances,
customers now have a simplified way of optimizing their existing
storage environment and reducing their physical storage requirements
many times over," said Scott Robinson, chief technology officer,
Datalink, a leading information storage architect. "Datalink has a long
history of successfully deploying and supporting Hitachi Data Systems
and Diligent Technologies solutions, and this latest offering opens up
new opportunities for us to provide our customers the performance,
scalability, and reliability they expect in a cost-effective appliance
package."

Commenting on today’s announcement, John Mansfield, senior vice
president, Global Solutions Strategy and Development, Hitachi Data
Systems added, "Hitachi has a proven track record in successfully
delivering powerful data de-duplication and data protection services to
customers in large scale enterprise deployments. Today, we are making
available these enterprise-grade storage services to medium-sized
customers with new cost-effective VTL appliances that are easy to
implement and easy to manage. We believe these appliances will meet our
customers’ requirements for greater application availability, robust
data protection, and long-term retention and protection of
business-critical data assets."

"Hitachi’s new VTL appliances will provide customers with new
choices for a range of IT environments," said Russ Fellows, Senior
Storage Analyst for Evaluator Group. "Combining the power efficiency of
Hitachi AMS storage systems with Diligent’s streaming data
de-duplication capabilities and integrated management may be the answer
to improving backup that IT departments have been searching for."

Specifically, Hitachi Data Systems today announced:

New VTL Appliance for Medium-Sized Customers
For customers requiring a high-performance, high-availability, yet cost
effective disk-based VTL solution, the Virtual Tape Library Appliance
Model 500M by Hitachi Data Systems delivers the fastest single-server
data de-duplication performance and highest capacity to meet the
requirements and budgets of medium-sized businesses. This VTL appliance
can store more than 500 terabytes of backup data storage capacity,
offering customers greater flexibility to accommodate their growing
business environments, while also optimizing existing storage assets.
Supported by the cost-efficient and high-performance Hitachi Adaptable
Modular Storage System (AMS) Model 500, the Virtual Tape Library
Appliance Model 500M by Hitachi Data Systems offers customers an
integrated set of advanced storage services that provides significant
reliability and responsiveness improvements in the back-up, recovery
and business continuity processes of medium-sized businesses.

New VTL Appliances for Enterprise Customers
Designed to meet the demand for high-performance, availability and
scalability of enterprise customers, the Virtual Tape Library Appliance
Model 1000E and 1000L by Hitachi Data Systems feature the Diligent
ProtecTIER Enterprise data de-duplication software to deliver the
industry’s fastest single server data de-duplication performance and
handle the largest capacity of back-up data. The Virtual Tape Library
Appliance Model 1000E offers up to 400MB/sec of throughput
performance—more than 300-percent faster than competitor offerings—and
is capable of managing more than 1 petabyte of back-up data. Taking
advantage of the advanced multi-processing technologies of the Hitachi
Adaptable Modular Storage, model AMS1000, these powerful VTL appliances
can also better centrally manage data assets, while also significantly
reducing backup time, speeding recovery and improving risk mitigation.

"Optimizing performance, data resiliency and improved data recovery
are all top of mind for Gartner customers and IT departments around the
world. Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) allow users to benefit from the
faster performance of disks while maintaining tape-based backup
methodologies without making significant system changes. With tens of
thousands of units shipped and hundreds of petabytes of capacity in the
market, VTLs are a significant vehicle for delivering advanced
functions and features," said David Russell, research vice president,
Gartner. "One of those advanced features, data de-duplication
technology, is poised to transform the way data is protected, improving
backup and recovery times and changing the economics of disk-based
approaches. As a result, VTL appliances with advanced data
de-duplication capabilities are increasingly important to companies as
they work to improve their storage utilization and maintain data
protection and recovery capabilities while reducing overall costs."