Storage giant Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) unveiled a major upgrade to its TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) yesterday, boasting enhanced performance, improved support for iSCSI, and new tools to help firms' business continuity and regulatory compliance efforts.

The company said the product had been re-engineered to increase performance by 25 percent, delivering the capacity to handle 2.5 million input-output operations per second.

Jonathan Grantham, UK sales director of HDS, said the improved performance would protect existing customers' investment in the platform and help them improve the performance of their virtualised tiered storage environments.

Grantham added that the platform also offered multi-protocol support for Fibre Channel, Escon, Ficon and NAS environments as well as improved support for the increasingly popular iSCSI storage protocol. "Lots of storage vendors are offering support for iSCSI but it is often just a plug-in to a third-party box that then connects to iSCSI," he said. "We are offering full integration within the storage platform."

The vendor said it had also bolstered its business continuity software products - Hitachi Universal Replicator and Hitachi In-System Replication - to replicate more data to back up systems and reduce the time it takes to recover replicated data if the original system fails.

A new audit log file also provides IT administrators with better information on their storage environment, according to Grantham. He argued that the ability to automatically log all user access operations performed on the system would help firms comply with the law and prove to regulators who accessed what stored data and when.

"Organisations now face massive fines if they lose data and that means we need to provide firms with ever more transparency over that data," Grantham said. "This capability extends transparency by allowing you to check who requested what data across hundreds of servers."

John McArthur of research firm IDC welcomed the enhancements. In a statement, he said scalability is increasingly important to IT directors as they investigate storage virtualisation tools. "But scalability is more than raw capacity," he added. "Companies like HDS are addressing the scalability requirement by scaling external device support, performance, connectivity, logical device support, and availability."