Rick Villars, vice president for storage systems and IT strategies at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said technologies like the Hitachi High Availability Manager provide users with instantaneous fail over and recovery capabilities "that can dramatically reduce data management costs while also reducing application downtime."

With the announcement, HDS CEO Jack Domme said the company is looking to shed its image as a hardware-only storage provider and take on the mantle as a provider of software and services that allow access to data, no matter what form -- block or file -- and no matter where it resides. Domme pointed out that 40% of HDS' revenue now comes from software and services.

The new clustering software works in conjunction with the USP V's fail over capabilities to vault data off site to other USP V's to help eliminate the risk of data inaccessibility from the host to primary storage.

The High Availability Manager software is used with HDS' replication software -- Hitachi Universal Replicator and Hitachi TrueCopy -- to fail over storage pools across storage arrays for data recovery at the primary site or at a remote sites during downtime.

According to HDS, a typical implementation requires a pair of Hitachi USP Vs, along with Hitachi's TrueCopy Synchronous software and Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager software on the hosts.