The move adds support for EMC's Symmetrix DMX 800, 1000, 2000, and 3000; and Symmetrix 3000, 5000, and 8000 series storage systems now, with support for the CLARiiON CX series by the end of January, said Hitachi.
"This means you can take a CLARiiON, virtualize it, and enable it to store mainframe data on SATA disks," said Yoshinori Okami, the general manager of Hitachi's storage systems development group, in a statement. "You can take a DMX, attach it to a Universal Storage Platform, and virtualize it as part of a logical partition, assigning dedicated resources to an individual application, [or] you can move data from CLARiiONs to Symmetrixes and back."
Hitachi's Universal Storage Platform supports up to 32 petabytes of internal and external storage, all of which can be collected into one common storage pool and managed by one set of software tools. Because it's controller-based, and appears to storage devices connected via Fibre Channel as just another Fibre interface, it doesn't require any appliances or routers in the data path, said Hitachi. Hitachi's partners immediately jumped in to announce that they would add the EMC-supporting capabilities to their own existing and upcoming hardware. HP, for instance, will support EMC virtualization in its StorageWork XP12000 Disk Array, while Sun said its Sun StorEdge 9990 would do the same.
EMC, meanwhile, is planning on rolling out its own virtualization technology, dubbed Storage Router, in the second quarter of this year. The storage giant has also made deals with third-party switch vendors such as Brocade, Cisco, and McData to build virtualization intelligence based on Storage Router into their products.