As the market for flash-based storage products continues to grow, more companies rally themselves to further expand the support for Solid State Drives adoption. On that note, Hitachi, one of the world's leading storage manufacturers, announced today the general availability of flash-based solid state drives for the company's Universal Storage Platform V and VM. According to Hitachi, the combination of the innovative flash-based storage technology and its virtualized storage services platform is meant to improve utilization, while also providing power and cooling consumption reduction.

“We are now offering customers the option of flash-based SSDs for the market-leading Hitachi USP V Platform because we recognize the needs of enterprise customers for state-of-the-art drive technology that can significantly boost performance-intensive applications,” said Roberto Basilio, vice president of storage platforms product management, Hitachi Data Systems. “Complementary to traditional hard disk drives, flash-based SSDs offer customers the ability to store working data, and move less frequently accessed data to a lower tier of storage, which translates into greater business productivity and lower OPEX costs.”

 

According to the company, Hitachi Storage Command software fully supports the new “tier zero” flash-based storage tier. This basically allows storage administrators to simplify the ability to replicate, manage and dynamically provision their administrated storage. All of these capabilities are available within a single set of management tools, which also includes the Hitachi replication software technology. Thus, Hitachi will provide its customers with a fast and fully featured storage platform, which takes advantage of the latest solution on the market.

 

Hitachi Data Systems also announced its plans to support the new flash-based drives recently introduced by the company's storage division. The maker also plans to offer flash-based SSDs, with 73GB and 146GB capacities, meant for its USP V and USP VM storage systems. These are slated to become available in Q1 2009.