A new class of enterprise storage systems from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is threatening to trump recent strong gains made by industry leader EMC. Last month, HDS unveiled in Hong Kong its refrigerator-sized TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) series, which promises to streamline and automate common management tasks across all storage system devices, including those from market giants EMC and IBM. At about the same time the announcement was made, HDS storage partners Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems unveiled their own versions of the TagmaStore USP system: the HP StorageWorks XP 12000 and the Sun StorEdge 9990. Tom Zack, HDS vice-president for Asia-Pacific marketing and technical operations, said: 'This platform represents a new category in our industry since its architecture enables new levels of virtualisation and replication not possible in previous generations of enterprise storage.' Storage virtualisation is an approach that enables a large organisation to treat all of its data storage assets as logical rather than physical resources. This allows an organisation to transform this infrastructure into a utility, which makes it possible to create as many virtual storage systems as and when needed it is needed, and at a cheaper cost than adding new devices. It is also an approach that every player in the storage industry has adopted, which prompted HDS to add a difference-making feature to TagmaStore. It acts roughly like a Universal Serial Bus drive that accepts all data sources, which can then be used on any USB-ready personal computer. 'The result is a new economic framework for information infrastructure, providing large organisations with millions of dollars in potential cost savings,' Mr Zack said. Designed to simplify business continuity for large companies, the TagmaStore USP is supposed to be capable of managing up to 32 petabytes of internal and external storage, make logical partitions in internal and external storage, and perform remote copies from any enterprise storage device. (A petabyte is equivalent to about one million gigabytes.) Mr Zack said cost reductions would be achieved through administrator productivity and a significant reduction in software licensing costs traditionally associated with maintaining multiple data copy and storage management products. Still, EMC seemed unfazed by the challenge from HDS and its partners. Citing recent data from research firm International Data Corp (IDC), EMC claimed its shipments of external storage systems (different from internal disk storage systems in server computers) grew faster year on year than the external disk storage systems from any of the next four largest suppliers (HP, IBM, Sun and HDS) in the first half of the year. IDC's external and internal second-quarter storage revenues in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) showed EMC to be posting a whopping 35 per cent increase in revenue to US$87.2 million from $64.6 million in the first quarter this year. Tokyo-based HDS, which is a subsidiary of Japanese electronics giant Hitachi, saw its second-quarter revenues in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) decline 10.5 per cent to US$37.4 million from $41.8 million in the previous quarter. But Howard Elias, executive vice-president of corporate marketing at EMC, said that having survived the dotcom crash and the economic downturn that followed, EMC would not rest on its laurels. 'We are well aware of the competition,' Mr Elias said. 'That is why we are in a period of transformation and why we are focused on information life cycle management as our strategy.' He said EMC's portfolio of software, hardware and services supported the creation, application, archiving and disposal of an organisation's entire data 'more efficiently and at a lower cost than other storage systems'. It is a strategy that helped EMC recently to secure a storage management systems contract from mobile operator Sunday, which is gearing up to deploy its third-generation cellular phone service. Agnes Mak, Sunday Group director for information technology, claimed Sunday was the first telecommunications network operator in Hong Kong to deploy a full ILM infrastructure.
