The move checks off an important feature that was promised for the Tagmastore, by qualifying Hitachi’s TrueCopy replication tool in async and sync flavors for IBM’s Shark and DS4000 formerly FastT and EMC’s Clarrion, Symmetrix and Symmetrix DMX arrays.
Those IBM and EMC boxes have already been qualified for use by Hitachi with the virtualization engine that allows the TagmaStore to aggregate and pool third-party disk capacity attached to it. But until now the qualification has only covered migration-style replication between third-party arrays, and not mirroring or snapshotting functions for disaster recovery purposes.
This is the last major piece to fall into place. Customers have been buying the TagmaStore in anticipation of us delivering this, said Hitachi.
Last month Hitachi implicitly confirmed reports that the TagmaStore sales are taking longer to complete as sales of the previous version of the Lightning, because customers are taking their time to understand the new box. As further confirmation, IDC’s latest market estimates show Hitachi losing disk array share in the fourth quarter last year.
Illustrating the perils of over-marketing and hype, Klaus Mikkelsen, senior director of storage applications at Hitachi’s subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems, said yesterday: Initially we saw some unusually long sales cycles, because we presented the TagmaStore as something radically different. Now that we’ve got the word that it’s not, the sales cycles are coming down. But Mikkelsen would not say how fast sales cycles are shrinking.
Last month HDS told Merrill Lynch that it would be able to reduce the different sales cycles of the Tagmastore to the same 45 to 60 days within a couple of quarters or a year at most. 45 to 60 days was the cycle associated with the previous Lightning.
