Storage Virtualization Gets Real

Your data center has a hidden resource. All that unused storage space, in all your heterogeneous systems. Systems you deployed tactically, each topped off with extra space—up to 75 percent of it—that you had to buy but never got to use.

Now you can use it. Hitachi Storage Virtualization lets you tap that hidden resource that's lying fallow in your multi-vendor environment. Based on our Universal Storage Platform™ systems, our unique virtualization capability masks complexity and presents all your heterogeneous storage capacity as a single pool that you can control and optimize simply and centrally, using one powerful suite of management tools.

What you get is the basis for a sustainable storage architecture. One that protects, grows, and lasts.

Gartner Rates Hitachi a "Strong Positive"

Gartner rates Hitachi a "strong positive" based on the "strength of the maturity and desirability of its feature set (particularly virtualization, thin provisioning and SATA drive support)...recent product enhancements, and its strong focus on the heterogeneous high-end enterprise storage market.

MarketScope for High-End Enterprise Disk Arrays, September 2008

Press Release

Gartner Report

Perspectives

Check out what customers, analyst and the press are saying Hitachi Data Systems Virtualization.

Blogs

HU Yoshida
Hitachi Data Systems CTO

Tony Asario
ESG Senior Analyst

David Merrill
Hitachi Data Systems Chief Economist

Success Stories

• Hitachi Breathes New Life into Critical Online Knowledge Base Applications
• Fidelity National Information Services Case Study
• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning Software at United Airlines

Analyst Perspectives & Reports

• IDC Whitepaper: Storage Economics - Assessing the Real Cost of Storage
• MarketScope for High-End Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2008: (Gartner)
• Addressing Business Challenges with a Scaleable Storage Infrastructure – (IDC)
• Hitachi extends it's lead in controller based storage virtualization – (Ovum)
• Implicit Advantages Accrue to Integrated Storage Management Suites (IDC)
• Storage Virtualization: Spin Free (Evaluator Group)
• Hitachi enhances the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (Ovum)

Press

• Hitachi Data Systems Announces the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and VM are Certified for Storage Interoperability with IBM zHPF Mainframe Enhancements
• Hitachi Data Systems Introduces Enhancements to the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform Family
• Storage Performance Council Hails the Hitachi USP V as the Highest Performing Storage System in the Industry
• Hitachi Data Systems Announces the Industry’s Greenest Enterprise-Class Data Center
• Hitachi Announces Data Migration Services Portfolio—World's Only Storage-Agnostic, Completely Transparent Data Migration Services
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Resources

Whitepapers

• The Economic Effects of Virtualization, Tiered Storage and Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning Software
• Tiered Storage Economics
  Defining and Calculating the Economic Benefit of Dynamic Tiered Storage Solutions
• Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ V and Universal Storage Platform VM
  Cost Effective Tiered Storage Options Design Guide
• Services Oriented Storage

Media

Hitachi Universal Volume Manager

Virtualization can help organizations reduce costs by letting them more efficiently use the storage resources and simplifying the management of their environment. Watch the demo and see how Hitachi Universal Volume Manager can help you keep your costs down!
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Attend a WebTech session to optimize or start designing your economically, ecologically superior architecture today. The Hitachi WebTech Series is Designed for the Hands-On Technical Expert
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Why Virtualize

Implementing Virtualization enables you to Sustain, Save and Grow efficiently to ensure an effective pathway to a brighter storage future.

Sustain

Virtualization addresses the growing pains of unsustainable, legacy storage architectures:

• Cost and Efficiency – You can't keep throwing more storage as point solutions for each user or business need. You need to balance high business demands with low budgets, contain costs, and "do more with less". Virtualization helps you reclaim, utilize and optimize your storage assets.
• Data and Technology Management – You have more and more data to manage, and you're dealing with a multi-vendor environment as a result of data growth and business change. It's time to rein in all those assets and manage them to drive your business.
• Improve Customer Service – You're under pressure to meet SLAs, align IT with business strategy, and support users and customers. Virtualizing enables you to deliver storage in right-sized, right-performing slices—slices of what you have now, but weren't maximizing before.
• Stay Competitive – Business is always looking for ways to be better, faster, cheaper. Hitachi Storage Virtualization increases business agility and lets you do more with less so that you can ramp up fast to meet changing business needs.
• Enhance Performance – The best way you can support your users and customers is to improve speed and access to their data. Virtualizing gives new life to your existing infrastructure because it lets you optimize all your multi-vendor storage and match storage to application requirements.

The hardware, software, services and partnerships to do it are here, now. IT organizations are virtualizing with Hitachi because our solutions are field-tested, award winning and reliable, minimizing the risk of transforming their old, unsustainable storage architectures into a sustainable architecture.

Sustainability

To us, sustainability is so much more than being green. It is a characteristic of a process or state of being that can be maintained, indefinitely. Hence, when we create products for Storage Virtualization, we create them in a way that helps our customers:

• Sustain and enhance their competitiveness
• Sustain and enhance their ability to reduce costs
• Sustain their ability to be more efficient
• Sustain and manage their growth
• Sustain and enhances speed & performance
• Sustain the earth’s resources
• Sustain and reduces their carbon footprint
• Sustain and enhance the relationship we have with each other
• Sustain their present investment in storage equipment
• Sustain and enhance their relationships with internal customers

We are all about building virtual storage solutions that help our businesses take care of their concerns, while taking care of Mother Earth and the demand on its resources, all the while leaving a legacy of quality virtual storage solutions and relationships with the people that we serve on our planet.

Do More With What You've Got

Save

• IDC estimates that storage accounts for 37% of overall data center power consumption. Hitachi Storage Virtualization solutions can help reduce energy and cooling costs by 30% - 50%.
• An Emerson Power survey projects that 96% of all data centers will not have sufficient power by 2011. *Source: Emerson Press Release, November 16, 2006
• Gartner predicts that by 2009, half of the world’s data centers will not have sufficient power to support their applications. *Source: "Gartner Says 50 Percent of Data Centers Will Have Insufficient Power and Cooling Capacity by 2008," Gartner Inc. Press Release, November 29, 2006

In our rough economic times, you need to justify IT spending by more sophisticated metrics than cost per megabyte. Metrics of capital expenses are no longer adequate because of the gigantic, hidden costs of management and maintenance.

Besides the explosion in routine operating expenses, you face the "stealth expense" of complying with industry and government regulations. Either you pay more now and meet standards—or risk getting fined for non-compliance.

Purchase price of a storage asset is generally only a third to a fifth of the total cost of ownership. At Hitachi, we've identified and characterized 32 different types of costs that can be used to baseline or track storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). To move toward an economically and ecologically superior storage architecture, you should choose metrics that apply to your business and budget—and choose investments and strategies that directly impact cost areas.

Some places to examine efficiencies and look for savings include:

• Power, cooling, and floorspace
• Cost and effectiveness of labor
• Cost of maintenance
• Return on Assets (ROA) – how well you're utilizing your assets
• Cost of growth
• Cost of performance (meeting SLAs)

Virtualization is a key enabler of strategies and solutions that can help you reclaim, utilize, and optimize storage space, and simplify storage management. It separates storage services from physical storage functions. Once you virtualize with Hitachi you can begin to manage all your storage with a common tool, lowering labor and maintenance costs. And, you can implement other "ingredients" that help you improve ROI and lower cost of performance and growth, such as tiered storage and thin provisioning.

Working with clients around the world, Hitachi has taken principles of Storage Economics to help create strategies, roadmaps, architectures, and solutions that actually reduce TCO.

Watch the Webcast

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Read the Whitepaper

Grow

Data centers are running out of space, and energy costs are rising. Hitachi Data Systems offers a cost-effective, eco-friendly, and socially responsible approach to help IT manage the explosive data growth and cope with the need to simplify storage management and keep costs under control.
At Hitachi, we think of the path toward a sustainable storage architecture as a Storage Maturity Model. It's phased growth and phased improvement that starts with consolidating and virtualizing data on our Universal Storage Platform and gradually add more capabilities and more value.

• Virtualization – You simplify the infrastructure and leverage Hitachi's common platform for storage management, business continuity, and services like NAS, Content Management, and Virtual Tape.
• Data Mobility – To further inprove efficiencies you add tools like Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager, so that you can migrate data across tiers quickly, with less risk, lower operating costs, and better application uptime.
• Policy-Based Automation – You've already aligned storage tiers to your business needs. Now you automate data movement across tiers so that it happens dynamically according to policies you create. For instance, if your Oracle application needs higher performance, your policy engine can automatically migrate the data to a higher tier so that you met SLAs. At this level of storage maturity, you'll be enjoying optimized performance, reduced infrastructure and management costs, and assured SLAs.
• Content-Aware Information – This is the peak of storage maturity. Based on metadata, your applications are automatically provisioned and tiered to meet SLAs. You've achieved a totally self-healing, intelligent storage platform.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization can put your data center’s bottom line in the green, enabling you to do more with less. We can help you to grow and nurture the strong roots needed to stabilize your environment and preserve your data economically and ecologically.

The sustainable, economically and ecologically superior storage architecture.

• Since 2000, the amount of corporate data generated worldwide has grown from 5 exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) to over 300 exabytes, with projections of ~1 zetabyte (1000 exabytes) by 2010. *Source: 2007 - "A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010", IDC White Paper,
• Transferring data to "the next technology" will cost you around $76,000 per terabyte. HDS Storage virtualization lets you take advantage of the features of new technology without physically moving the data.

Leverage the Hitachi Advantage

• Track Record – Solutions based on proven hardware, software and services - known for reliability and performance.
• Market Leadership – Over 4,500 Universal Storage Platforms and Network Storage Controllers have been shipped, and over 40 percent of them are being used for virtualization. They’re on a path toward developing a simplified, common, centrally managed platform for all their data. Hitachi is helping them protect their investment in multi-vendor storage assets and go beyond the limits of their environment.
• Thought Leadership – Hitachi Storage Virtualization is a building block of an economically and ecologically superior, sustainable storage infrastructure.
• Technology Leadership – Hitachi pioneered controller-based virtualization, a technology that separates storage controllers from the storage media in any type of environment. This architectural advance helps reduce power, cooling, and space requirements. Unlike competitors which are host or fabric-based, Hitachi’s virtualization is closer to the I/Os so it delivers more flexibility in changing and growing the infrastructure and doesn’t impose a load on the network. Other vendors’ virtualization solutions map servers to data.
• Scalability & Flexibility – Implement Hitachi storage virtualization with minimal impact to your SAN, because you connect the storage you want to virtualize to backend Fibre Channel ports in the Universal Storage Platform. Scale to 247PB on a Hitachi USP-V and reconfigure dynamically as business needs change.
• Industry Leadership – Hitachi participates as contributing members of leading national and international industry associations such as the Green Grid and the Storage Networking Industry Association. Hitachi was a key contributor in the development of the concept of virtualization, in conjunction with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). Together developing an industry wide definition of this technology:

Did you know?

Hitachi has shipped 11,000+  Universal Storage Platforms and Network Storage Controller. More than 40% of them are being used for virtualization.

Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V named Highest Performing Storage System in Industry by Storage Performance Council. USP V achieved an aggregated avg of 8,724.67 SPC-2 MBPSTM with a single storage controller, surpassing the performance levels of competitor enterprise storage systems tested by eight fold.

Storage Economics is a proven, methodical and business focused approach leveraging more than 600 customer engagements.

Hitachi Data Systems has been using the economic storage sales model for more than 10 years, longer than competition.

Since 2000, the amount of corporate data generated worldwide has grown from 5 exabytes (5 billion GB) to over 300 exabytes, with projections of ~1 zetabyte (1000 exabytes) by 2010. - "A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010", IDC White Paper, 2007.

Hitachi estimates that up to 75% of an organizations current investment in storage is wasted. Reclaim that wasted space with Hitachi virtualization.

Storage today is only 20% - 30% utilized--and storage purchases are growing at a 60% CAGR.

Transferring data to “the next technology” will cost you around $76,000 per terabyte. HDS Storage virtualization lets you take advantage of the features of new technology without physically moving the data.

IDC estimates that storage accounts for 37% of overall data center power consumption1  HDS Storage Virtualization solutions can help reduce energy and cooling costs by 30% - 50%.  “A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010”, IDC White Paper, March, 2007

An Emerson Power survey projects that 96% of all data centers will not have sufficient power by 2011. 2 2007 -  “A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010”, IDC White Paper

HDS pioneered controller-based virtualization, a technology that separates storage controllers from the storage media in any type of environment. This architectural advance helps reduce power, cooling, and space requirements.

Imagine what would happen to a company’s property manager who left costly office space 75% unoccupied! Why should you do that with storage space, when it’s clearly both economically and ecologically unsound? No organization can afford to do that—that’s why we say that current storage architectures are unsustainable.

A new architecture built on controller-based virtualization is sustainable, because it’s economically and ecologically sound. Controller-based storage virtualization enables IT to use that single pool of multivendor storage to create different storage tiers and store application data in the appropriate tier based on performance and capacity. That means the whole pool of storage can be used optimally—the organization’s entire investment in storage assets is optimized.

VMware

Hitachi Data Systems and VMware are fully engaged to deliver industry leading solutions addressing end-to-end server to storage virtualization. VMware server technologies and Hitachi storage and software technologies offer powerful solutions with VMware for storage consolidation, backup and archiving, business continuity and storage management.

• Support Virtualization with Advanced Storage Consolidation: Be Ready for Growth
• Backup and Archive: Safeguard Your Information Safe
• Replication Solutions for VMware Site Recovery Manager
• Storage Management: Deploy Storage Based on Business Application Requirements

Hitachi Data Systems and VMware are engaged at all levels of interoperability testing and certifications, support and engineering to assure timely and broad qualification and certifications for our mutual customers.

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Hitachi Solution for VMware Site Recovery Manager

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Hitachi VMware Site Recovery Manager with Hitachi Enterprise Storage Systems Implementation Guide

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Microsoft

Hitachi Data System's prioritizes Microsoft as a key alliance partner and provides mutual customers the optimal storage environment for their Windows based solutions. Hitachi Data Systems is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and offers a complete array of engineered and integrated solutions optimized for the Microsoft application environments. The Hitachi Data Systems objective for the alliance with Microsoft is to build tightly integrated storage solutions complementing the Windows environment, and enable customers of all sizes to implement scalable, available and reliable architectures in a cost effective way.

Hitachi Data Systems, in collaboration with Microsoft and other partners develop solutions for the Hitachi lines of storage and management software to help customers take full advantage of their Microsoft Windows environments. These solutions ensure seamless support of Windows, helping any organization—from the smallest to the largest enterprise—reduce the cost and complexity of running their business.

We combine our strengths as industry leader to understand the evolving needs of our customers and provide enterprise-quality, cost-effective storage solutions for Microsoft Windows environments.

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Oracle

Oracle, Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Data Systems have a collaborative alliance that leverages their combined leadership in enterprise-class storage solutions and Internet-enabled databases and applications. This partnership covers a full spectrum of cooperative technology, service and support, and marketing and sales efforts.

Together, we deliver true end-to-end, integrated solutions that meet customers' business-critical information management needs. As members of all Oracle's key storage initiatives, we work closely to make sure that our Hitachi Freedom Storage™ systems and Freedom Storage Software™ are integrated with Oracle information management software.
"Today’s enterprises search for backup solutions that are high in quality and cost-effective. In answer to these requirements, Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi, Ltd., have tested and evaluated best practices for using Automatic Storage Management (ASM), a new feature introduced in Oracle Database 10g, to simplify Oracle database file administration on the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ family of products while optimizing performance." - An application brief from Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle.

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