Hitachi Storage Solution for Cloud Computing -Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform-

INTRODUCTION THE amount of data handled within companies has been growing rapidly in recent years against a background in which increased use is being made of documents, images, video, and other forms of unstructured data. Steps are needed to cope with these data volumes, which are set to keep on increasing. Moreover, with the economic recession driving down IT (information technology) budgets, finding ways of managing these growing data volumes efficiently and at low cost has becoming increasingly important. Therefore, many companies have become interested in cloud computing as a way of overcoming these challenges, and growing expectations are being placed on storage virtualization as one of the technologies for achieving this. OVERVIEW: With growing interest in cloud computing driven by major changes in the business environment in recent years, high hopes are being placed on storage virtualization as a technology that can help realize the cloud. Hitachi has led its competitors by releasing a range of different storage virtualization technologies for enterprise use. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform announced in September 2010 was the first to provide virtualization of tiered storage and features an advanced architecture that allows its configuration to be expanded flexibly. It can be used to configure cloud systems with the high levels of flexibility, reliability, and performance to respond promptly to business changes.