Data center administrators face myriad challenges when it comes to managing the explosive growth of data coming into and moving across organizations today. Data capacity, applications and virtual servers are all growing at exponential rates and IT departments are struggling to store and manage all of that digital content, while keeping operational expenses in check.

To combat this, more and more enterprise customers are beginning to consider unified storage as a solution to help manage the rampant growth of data in their IT environments. Hitachi Data Systems’ (HDS) Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) system is designed to help businesses solve this problem by storing multiple data types that can handle their SLA/SLO requirements for critical business applications.

In addition to data efficiency capabilities such as thin provisioning and automatic tiering, HUS has an object-based file system that adds metadata for each file and enables automated tiering and migration, file snapshots and clones, replication over WAN and data searches. HUS also scales by predictable performance, replicated data, block volume size and file system size, so the platform grows with the business. Plus, it supports industry-standard APIs such as VAII (VMware), VSS (Microsoft) and other application connectors.

The starting list price for the block version of HUS is $22,745; the list price with the file version of HUS is $52,830, which includes the base hardware, software and installation charges with 36 months of software maintenance.

HUS will be integrated into Hitachi’s TrueNorth Specialization Program and allowing partners to become authorized to provide services, said Tonia Gonsalves, vice president of global partner enablement at HDS.