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.