Hitachi focuses on NAS market

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has announced a full-scale product

assault on the network atta-ched storage (NAS) market, sig-naling the

introduction of mul-tiple new NAS products spann-ing from high-end enterprise to

SMB market offerings.

Hitachi begins its NAS product rollout in 2005 with the

introduction of next generation embedded NAS Blades for the TagmaStore Universal

Storage Platform. The company claims that these products at introduction would

sell for 1/3rd the price of comparable NAS gateways and filers. With the newly

introduced NAS Blades, Hitachi will focus on capturing new NAS gateway and filer

sales opportunities, and consolidating all existing NAS gateways and filers in

an enterprise environment.

Following the introduction of embedded NAS Blades in its

high-end systems, Hitachi's strategy is to introduce a series of

channel-optimized midrange NAS offerings targe-ting the fast-growing Win-dows

and Linux-based SMB markets. According to the press release, the strategy calls

for these offerings to feature the most advanced NAS technologies in the

industry, and be available at aggressive price points with multiple

configuration options.

According to the company, the Hitachi NAS Blade is integrated

with the Universal Storage Platform and able to exploit all of its advanced

virtualization capabilities. Customers can create tiered storage environments by

mo-ving NAS data to any storage system attached to the Universal Storage

Platform via its Universal Virtualization Layer-such as EMC Sym-metrix and

CLARiiON CX series storage systems, and IBM TotalStorage DS4000 and ESS 2105

models-and inte-grate management of all SAN and NAS resources, with a single

point of management for all data classes (NAS, FC, SATA, ATA, ESCON, FICON). The

Hitachi NAS Blade for the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform is now generally

available.