Sahil,

The answer to your first question, is that the Hitachi Data Systems SRM solution gives customers a choice of synchronous or asynchronous remote replication between sites; so whatever your business requirements for data consistency, the Hitachi solution will work.  Secondly, our implementation utilized a full-volume clone at the remote site (ShadowImage software), which allows random D/R testing without distrupting ongoing remote replication.

The answer to your second question is that the USP-V allows customers to 'virtualize' other storage vendors solutions 'behind' the Hitachi USP-V.  Therefore you may continue to utilize existing storage capacity, perhaps in a tiered structure, all logically presented to host applications under the USP-V umbrella.