News

posted on 17 April 2008 08:56

Research firm TheInfoPro says Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is the number one block storage virtualization vendor.

Neither HDS nor TheInfoPro say on what basis this claim is made other than that in TheInfoPro's structured interviews with Fortune 1000 professionals HDS has 'consistently led in customers' ratings for both in-use block-level virtualization and near-term deployments.'

It's not clear what this consistent leadership means. Is it in terms of block virtualization units, petabytes virtualized, or customer satisfaction with products?

IBM claims that it has shipped more block virtualization product units with its SAN Volume Controller (SVC) than HDS has with its Universal Storage Processor (USP).

HDS's CTO, Hu Yoshida, said: "The steady stream of positive customer feedback speaks to the strength of our storage solutions and our unique ability to deliver these in a services-oriented approach. Hitachi is the only company to deliver storage virtualization in a scalable, enterprise-class, storage control unit, which in turn, provides the capability to aggregate the storage services of the control unit to enhance lower level storage resources."

"Combining storage services like thin provisioning in the control unit with virtualization of external storage creates a powerful combination designed to dramatically improve storage utilization across all tiers of virtualized storage. The results of this study clearly demonstrate that there is strong demand for enterprise-class storage virtualization, and we’re pleased to be recognized as the first choice among the Fortune 1000."

He is not claiming unit shipment leadership nor petabytes virtualized leadership but does mention customer feedback.

TheInfoPro describes itself as 'an independent research network created by alumni of Gartner, Giga and Bell Labs that produces fundamental, objective, "grass roots" research on markets, vendors, issues, future adoption plans and investor confidence.' It does not use an expert/analyst research model, instead basing its findings on a peer-to-peer model.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}