Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today announced that it has obtained certification under VMware’s new external storage virtualization hardware certification program. The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ and Network Storage Controller systems are now certified with VMware Infrastructure 3 as part of the new program.

Hitachi and VMware customers will be able to experience the combined benefits of storage and server virtualization including reduced IT costs, simplified management, improved operational efficiencies and quality-of-service for applications.

“There are immediate synergies we see between the virtualization technologies from Hitachi Data Systems and VMware deployed in our data center,” said Renar Grunenberg, manager, Data Administration Group, HUK Coburg. “The certification of Hitachi’s virtualized storage with VMware Infrastructure 3 ensures the mutual vendor support of the deployments and reduces complexity — simplifying the management of our virtual infrastructure.”

“VMware Infrastructure 3 has allowed our customers to optimally deploy and re-mobilize applications against a pool of server and storage capacity that can grow with the business’ needs,” said Brian Byun, vice president of Global Partners and Solutions, VMware. “A scalable networked storage architecture provides the foundation for VMotion-optimized distributed volume management capabilities native to VMware Infrastructure 3 environments, and completes this ‘scale out’ view of a virtual data center. With the completion of this certification, VMware and Hitachi Data Systems customers can now implement Hitachi Data Systems Universal Storage Platform controller-based storage virtualization to further optimize the utilization and management of Hitachi Data Systems storage that supports their growing VMware Infrastructure 3 farms.”

“VMware is clearly the leader in delivering best-in-class solutions for server consolidation — enabling users to consolidate multiple operating systems and applications on the same physical host server,” said John Mansfield, senior vice president, Global Solutions Strategy and Development, Hitachi Data Systems. “To realize the full range of VMware’s server consolidation benefits, storage must be optimized to work in conjunction with VMware. With more than 6,000 Intelligent Virtual Storage Controllers shipped, Hitachi delivers the storage virtualization solutions that provide the ease-of-consolidation and safe multi-tenancy required for these types of environments. Additionally, the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and Network Storage Controller offer clients logical partitioning services that ensure quality-of-service for virtual machines.”

Based on the VMware-certified Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and Network Storage Controller, Hitachi Data Systems is identifying four solution areas targeted for VMware environments:

• Consolidation and Multi-Tenancy Solutions: Customers are faced with server and storage proliferation, multiple server and storage assets, underutilized resources, steep learning curves associated with each asset, and out of control capital and operational expenditures. For customers looking to consolidate server and storage infrastructure to improve utilization and reduce capital expenditures, complementary virtualization technology from Hitachi Data Systems and VMware is now available. The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform enables customers to virtualize their entire storage environment allowing VMware servers to leverage storage tiers based upon business needs. Hitachi delivers unique, safe multi-tenancy and logical partitioning capabilities that can ensure a quality-of-service for a host server, by preventing other host servers from accessing common resources such as cache. Consolidation of server and storage assets with VMware and Hitachi Data Systems virtualization technologies improves utilization and allows assets to be more easily managed.
• Data Migration Solutions: Technology refreshes are time consuming and can be highly prone to human errors. A recent survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group indicates that less than 25-percent of data migrations are without problems. Data life cycle management requirements can further exacerbate this problem as aligning infrastructure (both server and storage) to business needs can be rather challenging. Hitachi Data Systems and VMware offer a synergistic set of tools for data migration which enable customers to seamlessly move applications across the server infrastructure and migrate associated data across multiple storage tiers. Similar to what VMware’s VMotion does for servers, Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager software can non-disruptively migrate data and right-size the storage infrastructure.
• Quality-of-Service (QoS) Assurance: QoS assurance is critical in a multi-tenancy environment as customers have struggled with low profile applications consuming resources from mission-critical applications. Hitachi Data Systems and VMware offer tools for quality-of-service in multi-tenancy environments to allow resources to be allocated and dynamically changed to ensure SLAs. Hitachi Virtual Partitioning Manager and Server Priority Manager work in conjunction with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler to dynamically allocate resources and ensure resource availability for critical applications. With this approach, customers can ensure that resources can be flexibly allocated so that business needs are met rather than just accept delays due to ‘end-of-month processing.’
• Business Continuity Solutions for the VMware Platform: Hitachi Data Systems offers a robust suite of business continuity solutions for VMware Infrastructure deployments.

For more information on Hitachi Data Systems’ VMware certification please visit: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_guide.pdf