HDS Universal Storage Platform With Encryption

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced significant enhancements to the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform family. Hitachi Data Systems continues to offer customers a best-in-class storage services platform designed to help customers boost heterogeneous storage asset utilization in order to more efficiently manage business-critical operations and lower storage management costs.

"Hitachi Data Systems continues to outdistance its competitors with innovative solutions that directly address the needs of customers," said Josh Krischer, founder, Josh Krischer & Associates. "What makes this solution so effective is the Hitachi high-end enterprise controller design which enables most advanced functionality — including advanced security features such as the new internal data encryption, virtualization, logical partitioning, thin provisioning, business continuity and disaster recovery services — across the enterprise storage infrastructures. The pace of innovation is unmatched in the industry, which continuously increases the gap between Hitachi Data Systems and its main competitors."

New Encryption of Data-at-Rest Feature
Further recognizing customers’ needs to reduce business risk and comply with increasingly stringent security requirements, Hitachi Data Systems is offering several enhanced security features to enable customers to focus on regulatory compliance and corporate governance, while reducing complexity and cost. The enhancements also enable significant heat and power savings, compared with other alternative technologies.
The new controller-based encryption of data-at-rest feature provides confidentiality protection for internal hard disk drives by translating the data into secret code in the encrypting back-end director as it is written to the drives and decrypting the data when it is read. This means that IT managers can encrypt data on all of the internal hard disk drives, and return hard disk drives with sensitive information for maintenance purposes, while ensuring data confidentiality.
Additionally, the integrated key management can be used to securely export encryption keys that can be backed up and stored at an offsite location or with a commercial key escrow service for added security. Hitachi is the only vendor that encrypts data through the storage controller, and therefore does not require host CPU power or expensive inline appliances. This benefits customers by offering lower cost, a lower energy footprint, and greater heat and power savings.
Bryan Cripps, Storage Architect of Sealed Air Corporation, a leading global innovator and manufacturer of a wide range of protective packaging and performance-based materials including BubbleWra, stated: "Leveraging the advanced enterprise-class functionality of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, we’re able to unite previously isolated storage systems into one virtual pool of storage to gain data migration and advanced storage management capabilities that meet even our most demanding workloads. This solution has enabled us to further reduce management complexity and ownership costs while keeping the business running smoothly."

Improved Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning Software for Performance Optimization
Hitachi Data Systems is also announcing enhancements to the Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software, including dynamic online virtual volume expansion for Microsoft Windows servers and extended support for Hitachi TrueCopy Remote Replication and Hitachi Universal Replicator software. The extended support enables pair operations between dynamically provisioned volumes and static volumes, and online Dynamic Provisioning volume capacity expansion. The improvements to the Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software benefits customers by offering greater flexibility both in daily data asset protection functions and disaster recovery procedures without sacrificing storage savings, administrative simplification and performance optimization.

Enhanced Business Continuity Capabilities
Hitachi Data Systems is offering enhanced functionality to the Hitachi Universal Replicator and Hitachi TrueCopy software solutions, which is designed to protect against data loss and enable the continued operation of criticalbusiness applications. For IT administrators tasked with managing business continuity, replication and disaster recovery strategies, the new 3 Data Center Universal Replicator cascade pass-through solution, an out-of-region protection strategy, reduces the total storage requirement with the use of dynamically provisioned pools in the intermediate site, and ensures the availability of up-to-date copies of data in dispersed locations. This solution saves storage costs at the intermediate site and provides Hitachi TrueCopy software synchronization times with long distance recoverability.
"By continually enhancing the industry-leading Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and VM, Hitachi Data Systems is ensuring that customers are able to benefit from the most advanced, critical storage solutions for today’s changing business environments," said Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. "With these improvements, Hitachi Data Systems is extending its promise of innovation and reliability to customers, while ensuring that companies of varying sizes with different IT demands can benefit from the industry’s highest performing and most scalable storage solution in the market today."

New Enterprise-Class Data Security Services
In an effort to insulate exposure to legal liabilities or loss of customers’ corporate data assets, Hitachi Data Systems is also introducing two new data security services: Disk Destruction and Recycling Service and Disk Data Eradication Service. Provided via a partnership with PeakData LLC, these services enable both the physical destruction of failed or retired hard disk drives and ensure complete verifiable eradication of data, without interruption to customers’ business-critical operations.

Support for 450GB Hard Disk Drives
For companies needing more storage capacity for their growing data information, Hitachi Data Systems is introducing support for 450GB 15K rpm Fibre Channel disk drives. This provides a new high-capacity, high-performance drive with 50 percent more storage capacity than the currently available 300GB 15K rpm internal disk drive. It allows a greater amount of data to be stored in the same physical space, and reduces costs for power, cooling and data center facilities with the performance advantages of 15K rpm drives.

Best-in-Class Virtualized Tiered Storage Solution for Midrange customers
Additionally, Hitachi Data Systems is introducing a rackless version of the Hitachi USP VM that customers can easily and cost-effectively install in their preferred standard or existing 19-inch rack. With evolving economic challenges and ever-changing business requirements, mid-range customers need more than just a traditional one-size-fits-all architecture and feature set. With features like storage virtualization, dynamic tiered storage, dynamic provisioning, and advanced data replication, and enhanced security capabilities, the newly enhanced Hitachi USP VM brings high-end capabilities that midrange customers can immediately take advantage of. The Hitachi USP VM in combination with the innovations introduced with the new Hitachi AMS Series 2000, Hitachi Data Systems is providing the most comprehensive midrange storage portfolio to maximize storage asset investments and optimize operational efficiency and resilience.