Semi-OT: (Not direct competitor)Hitachi to Launch Storage Machine
Tool Challenges IBM, EMC At High End Using Concept
Known as 'Virtualization'
By CHARLES FORELLE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 7, 2004; Page B3
Hitachi Data Systems will launch a powerful data-storage machine that it says is the fastest device at the high end of the market, providing a fresh challenge to industry leaders International Business Machines Corp. and EMC Corp.
The company, a unit of Hitachi Ltd. of Tokyo, is expected to unveil the widely anticipated product at New York's Guggenheim Museum today.
HDS, as the company is known, is trying to make a broader push into the high-end storage arena, involving massive machines used by businesses to store trillions of pieces of information. HDS runs well behind EMC and IBM in the overall storage-systems market. Pricing for the new line, dubbed TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, will start around $700,000 and run into the millions of dollars.
TagmaStore -- the name comes from a Greek word that roughly means "something put in order" -- will make use of "virtualization," a hot concept that's often bandied about the industry.
A TagmaStore device will let competitors' machines plug into it and essentially co-opt the rival machines' disk drives, so that a server looking to store data will think that the other vendors' machines are just part of a big TagmaStore.
The concept isn't entirely new. IBM, EMC and others also make virtualization products of different stripes. But HDS says its solution is the most advanced, thanks to very fast processing units that are powerful enough to handle the work required to trick the servers and the storage devices.
"There is no comparison to this solution," says Shinjiro Iwata, the company's chief executive.
HDS says virtualization has myriad uses, among them easily moving old data off expensive disks and on to cheaper ones, without the server being aware that a change has occurred.
Furthermore, company officials say, customers who have a room full of competitors' hardware don't need to jettison their existing machines to use Tagma-Store -- they can plug them in.
HDS parent Hitachi is a huge conglomerate with about $80 billion in sales. Its storage-systems group -- which includes HDS as well as a part of Hitachi that sells the same products in Japan -- is a fraction of the company, racking up $2.5 billion in sales in the year ended March 31.
Hitachi has made it clear it wants to expand its storage business, and the TagmaStore's virtualization capability could expand the company's traditional focus on high-end machines, says Richard Villars, an analyst at research firm IDC. "In a sense, that puts them much more in direct competition with IBM and EMC." |
