Hitachi Adds Clustering to USP V for High Availability

Hitachi Data Systems on Wednesday added a High Availability Manager to its Universal Storage Platform V that it described as the industry's first controller-based failover system that uses clustered storage arrays to replicate data to a secondary site.

The company said the system its Universal Replicator and TrueCopy software to copy data from a pool of virtualized storage to a secondary site to protect against any type of failure, providing customers with quick access to data without downtime. It also can migrate data to multiple Hitachi USP V systems. "Customers should never have to see an outage," said Claus Mikkelsen, CTO of Storage Architectures at HDS.

The High Availability Manager mirrors the data from the primary site to the secondary site using synchronous replication, which limits the distance between the two sites. "We expect them to be in the campus. This protects against a single point of failure concerns. It is not a DR [disaster recovery] solution," Mikkelsen said. He said the mirroring requires little work by storage administrators and doesn't require taking down the host.

HDS said in a conference call with reporters that news organization Thomson Reuters has been evaluating the High Availability Manager. "This robust solution combines continuous high-availability and disaster recovery protection in virtualized SAN environments and the ability to seamlessly migrate data between arrays, and to refresh the SAN non-disruptively," said Christopher Crowhurst, vice president of strategic technology for the professional division of that company, in a statement. "This design helps remove the impact of potential failures, reduce management costs, and simplify business operations, and was a major reason behind our adoption of the Hitachi USP V platform as our preferred SAN virtualization solution going forward."

Richard Villars, vice president for storage systems and IT strategies at research company IDC, said businesses are looking for ways to reduce operational costs in this tough economy while they cope with growing amounts of data that needs to be stored and protected. "One major and fast growing operational cost is the time and money that IT organizations spend to migrate data to new, more cost effective solutions," he said in a statement. "Solutions like the Hitachi High Availability Manager provide customers with instantaneous failover and recovery capabilities that can dramatically reduce data management costs while also reducing application downtime."

Mikkelsen said the new features, when combined with HSD' storage virtualization platform, is another step in trying to help enterprise IT managers deal with the need to protect vast quantities of information that they must store for longer periods of time. The company's centralized management approach can help companies consolidate and boost utilization rates on storage systems while data reduction archiving capabilities can reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored.