Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, provider of Application Optimized Storage solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, today announced that leading industry analyst research firm Ovum has indicated that storage array controller-based solutions will provide customers the most robust and functionally rich virtualization implementations over network-based solutions. In a recent report titled, "Storage Functionality -- the intelligent controller versus the network," the analyst firm analyzed where critical storage functionality should be placed to optimize and leverage the capability across heterogeneous environments. According to Ovum, dynamic business requirements continue to drive 50 percent-plus annual storage capacity growth rates, making supporting storage infrastructure a major item of focus for IT organizations. Virtualization and the introduction of common management and functionality across heterogeneous arrays provides an opportunity to introduce dramatic efficiencies to storage management operations, resulting in higher storage administrator efficiencies, lower costs and improved overall IT responsiveness to business requirements. "We believe the ability to mix and match disk technologies and architectures (mid-range and enterprise, possibly from different vendors) as required is crucial to ongoing simplification, with the selection determined and managed by user-defined, service level policies," said Carl Grenier, senior vice president, Infrastructure, Ovum. "This requirement would take the current SAN/NAS consolidation a step further by separating the storage controller personality from the physical disk storage." Ultimately, storage decisions will no longer be modular versus enterprise array, or fibre channel versus SATA/high-capacity fibre channel drives -- they will be more reflective of business value, according to Ovum. "We believe the storage array controller-based and network (intelligent switch)-based solutions will gain the most traction at the point of virtualization," added Grenier. "However, storage array controller-based solutions will provide the most robust and functionally rich implementations." Ovum states that there are several reasons why intelligent switch solutions have not gained much acceptance in the marketplace. Each vendor's solutions support different switch-based hardware for the functionality engine, and there are no emerging standards to address this issue. In addition, switch-based solutions need to address the issue of maintaining state and/or cache coherency. Ovum states this adds complexity to the design, and gets more difficult to solve as systems scale up/out. "Like servers as opposed to PCs, or directors as opposed to switches, the independent controller must be a real storage controller and not some other device emulating controller functions," said Grenier. "Storage controllers are designed for high availability and to maintain state and cache coherency. Physically separating the controller from the storage does not eliminate any responsibilities of the controller, if anything, it makes even more important." "When we first introduced our radical innovation of separating the intelligent storage controller from the commodity media, we knew that we were giving our customers unparalleled flexibility in how they could utilize their storage resources," said Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer, Hitachi Data Systems. "Customers who have embraced this approach can now match application requirements to storage attributes. They can seamlessly introduce intelligent virtual storage controllers into their environments and gain the benefits of new functionality on existing storage assets -- unlike other virtualization approaches that require customers to tear apart their fragile SAN configurations, our controller based approach is not dependent on the SAN, supporting direct attach, mainframes, NAS, as well as integrating into existing SANs, making it the simplest and most comprehensive approach to virtualization. We are pleased that our unique virtualization model is being recognized by Ovum as a robust method of optimizing storage environments." To read more about how Hitachi Data Systems is setting the standard for storage array controller-based virtualization solutions, see the full Ovum report. its Web site