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Shoden Offers Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform - First to Offer Full VMware VAAI Support for Heterogeneous Storage in South Africa

Industry’s Only 3D Scaling Platform Helps Customers Maximise Performance, Improve Scalability and Provide Investment Protection for VMware Environments

JOHNNESBURG, March 2011 – After the announcement of Hitachi Data Systems new enterprise storage array, Shoden Data Systems is pleased to announce new enhancements to the Virtual Storage Platform which further extends the technology leadership of Hitachi within the enterprise storage arena. With many organisations having invested in server virtualisation solutions from VMware, the availability of VAAI from Hitachi enables complete integration between the world’s leading server and storage virtualisation technologies.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), recently announced VMware® vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) support on Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and, through the platform’s unique 3D scaling architecture, can extend this capability to more than 100 virtualised multivendor storage arrays. As the first storage platform to offer full VAAI support for virtualised storage, Hitachi VSP provides a truly integrated foundation for growing VMware environments, giving customers the flexibility and scalability they need while protecting existing investments.

“While other vendors may support VAAI, only Hitachi Data Systems has the external storage virtualisation necessary to address our customers’ top business needs to optimise application performance and reduce IT costs,” said Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. “Competitive approaches require customers to ‘rip and replace’ existing infrastructures and go through the painstaking process of migrating hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines to benefit from VAAI. The 3D scaling architecture of Hitachi VSP allows customers to scale up, out and deep to take immediate benefit of VAAI to improve virtual machine density, scalability and virtualised application performance.”

“VAAI is key in enabling the next wave of VMware adoption," said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Hitachi's support for VAAI in a heterogeneous storage environments will help customers accelerate virtualisation deployments as they wrestle with production applications and are held hostage by the manual configuration, sizing, and performance challenges.”

In a January 2011 CIO Peer2Peer Research Panel poll, 97 percent of respondents indicated they were investing in server virtualisation projects and more than 50 percent said they planned to initiate storage virtualisation projects over the next 12 months. The number one reason given to support the move to more virtualisation-focused initiatives was the need to remedy existing storage and server resource inefficiencies. Hitachi VSP is the only solution available today that cost-effectively solves these challenges. Hitachi VSP provides full VAAI support, including:

• Full Copy: speeds up virtual machine cloning and Storage vMotion in the storage system by up to 18 percent by enabling the storage arrays to make full copies of data within the array
• Write Same (Block Zeroing): speeds up provisioning of new virtual machines by up to 85 percent by eliminating the need to write zero formats, immediately removing previously deleted blocks and increasing the space efficiency of the system
• Hardware Assisted Locking (SCSI Reservation Lock): enables faster locking and improves virtual machine density and performance by up to 35 percent by removing SCSI reservation conflicts

Hitachi VSP 3D scaling, dynamic tiered storage and tight integration with vSphere provide an ideal IT platform for VMware and cloud environments. Hitachi VSP addresses the challenges of server virtualisation as these environments scale, enabling customers to:

• Achieve the highest performance and virtual machine density for virtualised applications in production environments
• Automate and consolidate tiered storage assets while ensuring the highest levels of reliability, performance and availability
• Simplify and unify storage management to maximise IT resources, and importantly, reduce IT costs and minimize risk
• Scale to support large-scale virtualised application environments, including VDI

Hitachi Data Systems is the first company to fully certify virtualised storage with VMware VAAI. Since 2002, Hitachi Data Systems and VMware have delivered innovative, end-to-end virtualisation for storage consolidation, backup and archiving, business continuity and storage management. As the leader in storage virtualisation and an Elite-level partner in the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program, HDS uniquely bridges the gap between server and storage infrastructures in customers' data centers and helps customers optimise the operational efficiency and resiliency of their IT environments to achieve significant cost savings.

Availability

Hitachi VSP support for VAAI is available worldwide and via Shoden Data Systems in South Africa. VMware VAAI is supported on VMware vSphere 4.1 and later. 

What Customers Want

The availability of VAAI from Hitachi Data Systems will extend organisations ability to further benefit from their investment in VMWare server virtualisation within their data centers. With the massive growth of virtual machines in organisations, the ability to manage the entire virtualisation stack is imperative for operational efficiency.

“The unique features and capabilities of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform will add tremendous value to our clients’ technology environments.” states Shaun Barendsen, National Sales Manager, Shoden Data Systems.” Understanding real customer challenges and providing innovative technology and solutions have made Shoden Data Systems and Hitachi Data Systems storage enterprise partners of choice. Assisting with making clients’ environments simpler to manage is what we strive for and with a partner like Hitachi Data Systems, meeting clients’ expectations is straightforward.”

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About Shoden

Shoden Data Systems PTY (Ltd.) provides innovative, high-end technology solutions to leading organisations across Africa, allowing them to gain what Shoden refers to as:“The data centre advantage”. Shoden aims to deliver the data centre advantage by understanding clients’ challenges and implementing optimised solutions that address these challenges, coupled with excellent service and support.

About Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer ROI, unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. With a vision that IT must be virtualised, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. With more than 4,500 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Hitachi Data Systems products, services and solutions are trusted by the world’s leading enterprises, including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 and more than 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100. Hitachi Data Systems believes that data drives our world – and information is the new currency. To learn more, visit: http://www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.  

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2009 (ended March 31, 2010) consolidated revenues totaled 8,968 billion yen ($96.4 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

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