Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) on Monday entered the network-attached storage (NAS) market with a new blade as part of its high-end virtualization platform, the TagmaStore array. The blade is the first Hitachi-developed NAS offering. The company will continue to sell third-party NAS products as part of an agreement with Network Appliance.
Each of the TagmaStore"s NAS blades scales to 512TB of capacity, and the array can hold up to eight blades, said Claus Mikkelsen, Hitachi"s senior director of storage applications.
"One NAS Blade enables the consolidation of multiple NAS filers and large NAS workloads. That will reduce the cost and management required to manage several islands of file servers or NAS filer appliances," said Mikkelsen.
The system is priced at US$86,700 for a system that includes the NAS Blade, NAS Blade software and 1.2TBÂ of capacity.
IDC currently forecasts the NAS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.7 percent, reaching $3 billion by 2008.
In other recent NAS news, Network Appliance (NetApp) last week changed the name of its virtualization appliance from gFiler to the V-Series. The company also said that the V-Series will support IBM, EMC, and HP arrays later this year. It currently supports HDS arrays.