JAPANESE GIANT HITACHI reckons it's upgraded its enterprise class Universal Storage Platform V as well as its Storage Command Suite management software, according to a particularly long and waffly press release.

Apparently the upgrades mean that there is now support for local and remote replication of thin-provisioned volumes, higher-capacity, 400GB fibre Channel drives and 1TB Serial ATA drives. It also means that cache is doubled from 500GB to 1TB.

The company also said that management tools were now all bunged together under the umbrella of the Hitachi Storage Command Suite.

Hitachi’s USP V, with controller based virtualisation, is managed through Hitachi's Storage Command Suite software.

Hitachi also unveiled its new Replication Manager, which aspparently combines all replication operations. This will allow users to manage Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) in mainframe as well as open systems.

Hitachi's Storage Capacity Reporter, “delivers storage array, host and application-level storage capacity reporting across heterogeneous storage systems, without the need for host agents”.

This includes real-time and historical capacity views, forecasting and predictive analysis, as well as virtualisation mapping and reporting.

We're really excited. µ