BANGALORE, INDIA: Hitachi Data Systems Corp, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., announced a new server-to-storage virtualization initiative to drive efficiencies across virtualized environments. To support this strategy, Hitachi Data Systems also announced two business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for virtual environments—Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V and Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Mark Bowker, analyst—Enterprise Strategy Group, HDS said, "With the introduction of Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V and Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, Hitachi not only demonstrates this end-to-end capability but also its ability to integrate across virtualization platforms. Hitachi's advances in business continuity and disaster recovery help customers quickly see the value of virtualization extended throughout the IT infrastructure."

Separately, server and storage virtualization enable many important benefits such as resource consolidation, improved performance, improved data protection, high availability, and improved utilization. Together, server-to-storage virtualization can help organizations optimize performance, minimize planned and unplanned downtime and importantly, extend data protection to additional applications and data types, helping them save money.

"Business continuity and disaster recovery are increasingly critical requirements, but in today's difficult economic climate, preventing business downtime is absolutely essential," said Asim Zaheer, VP—Product and Competitive Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. "By offering both Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V and Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, we provide organizations the ability to select business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that best meet their specific needs and requirements over the short and long term."

Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V combines the key platform capabilities of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 including high availability through Microsoft Multipath I/O, server virtualization and clustering with the rich platform capabilities of Hitachi Data Systems storage virtualization and system-based replication.

The second generation of Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager adds important support for the midrange Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage family and provides customers continuous, real time local and remote replication, and automatic failover capabilities to help ensure resilient data protection, high availability and disaster recovery.