A number of storage virtualization appliances,positioned within the I/O path between host and storage environments,have been available to storage administrators for the past few years. However, the majority of these appliances have been deployed to perform a limited set of functions, such as data migration or replication, across disparate storage systes.

The Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform essentially blows appliance based storage virtualization away.Unlike these appliances,it scale up to 32 petabytes, create up to 32 logical controller images, and offers multiple options for data copy and migration. As a result the Universal Storage Platform offers significant new levels of performance and scalability over currently available virtualization appliance, while preseving some of their more attractive features such as the ability to copy and move data among disparate disk storage arrays.