Hitachi Data Systems last month said it has enhanced its largest storage arrays with software and hardware that gives the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) a 25 per cent performance boost.
The company has enhanced the microcode and added optional 4Gbps Fibre Channel controllers, iSCSI connections and new load-balancing capabilities among the processors to allow the TagmaStore to operate at 2.5 million I/Os per second.
TagmaStore, which is available in three models — the USP 100, 600 and 1100 — is aimed at large enterprises running applications that process online transactions or consolidating storage and server environments.
The TagmaStore’s virtualization capability can manage as much as 32 petabytes of external and internal Fibre Channel, network-attached, ESCON or FICON storage. With this release, the company has also added iSCSI support.
“Customers can consolidate a large number of servers through the box,” said David Floyer, CTO for IT consultancy Barometrix in Mountain View, Calif. “You can connect them with these virtual ports and reduce the cost of the connection.”
The USP also features performance enhancements to its Hitachi Universal Replicator and ShadowImage In-System Replication software, which assist in safeguarding data for regulatory compliance or disaster recovery.
The Universal Replicator, long-distance replication software, now can accommodate the distribution of 64KB data volumes across as many as four TagmaStore USPs. Previous TagmaStore arrays could replicate data only between two systems.
The software also has a new capability called Delta Resync for open system and mainframe environments that allows a customer to recover to a local or intermediate site when the primary site has failed.
The new capability copies only data differences from the intermediate site to the disaster-recovery site during the recovery process, thus saving on the amount of data replicated and the time it takes.
The Hitachi ShadowImage In-System Replication has been enhanced to accommodate more data volumes and has as much as 300 per cent increased performance, according to Hitachi. It can now perform as many as 128 concurrent operations.
“From a practical point of view, the performance enhancement of the replication engine is the most important,” Floyer said. “What could have been considered a bottleneck before is now four times as fast.”
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