Hitachi Announces Data Migration Services

Addressing increasing customer demands for data migration solutions that
do not suffer from severe scalability constraints or bring applications
to a business-grinding halt, Hitachi introduced new data migration
services that places the needs of the business first.

Supporting Hitachi’s
Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy which leverages Hitachi’s
market-leading virtualization technology to deliver common storage
services, the Hitachi Data Migration Services, enables enterprises to
easily and transparently migrate data between heterogeneous storage
systems while servers and applications stay online.

Hitachi Data Migration Services provide a synergistic fusion of
consultative services, advanced data movement software and intelligent
virtualization controllers to enable the most efficient data migration
in the industry today with virtually no latency, no scalability
limitations, and no excuses.

According to IDC, 60 percent of all data centers will relocate over the
next five years, primarily for space, power and cooling reasons. Costs
related to moving data and making changes to storage infrastructures are
substantial. Migration and provisioning complexities often require
shutting down applications to move data or provision new storage
capacity, often costing in excess of $50,000 for each migrated array,
according to independent studies conducted by leading CIO consultancy
ITCentrix.

The Weather Channel, a 24-hour weather network seen in more than 96
million U.S. households, is one of the many companies that has benefited
from Hitachi Data Migration Services. Already having more than 80
terabytes of Hitachi storage in an environment consisting of 500
Microsoft® Windows/Linux servers, the company
was looking to migrate 20 terabytes of Tier 1 data from a Hitachi
Lightning 9980 V to a Hitachi Universal Storage Platform. Hitachi was
able to eliminate data loss, drastically limit downtime and speed the
entire migration by using virtualization to non-disruptively migrate
data between the two platforms.

“Because we provide critical national,
regional and local weather information and alerts to tens of millions of
consumers on The Weather Channel, weather.com and mobile platforms,
downtime is not an option,” said Brian Shield,
CIO, The Weather Channel. “From planning to
execution and support, Hitachi’s data
migration services were flawless. With Hitachi, there was absolutely no
data loss, the migration was much faster than we expected, and there was
zero negative impact to our users. In short, Hitachi surpassed our high
expectations.”

Commenting on today’s announcement, Hicham
Abdessamad, vice president, Global Solution Services, Hitachi Data
Systems, added, “Whether our customers are
looking to migrate data for system upgrades, storage consolidation, or
for development and testing purposes, through our unique approach, we
are essentially removing the risks often associated with data migration.
We have led the industry in storage virtualization for many years and we
are using our proven experience in this arena to deliver transparent and
rapid data movement between heterogeneous storage systems —
making it easier for our customers to focus on what matters most, their
business.”

The new Hitachi Data Migration Services portfolio, available
immediately from Hitachi’s Global Solution
Services (GSS) consultancy, includes:

• GSS Data Migration Consulting and Implementation Services: Hitachi
  utilizes best practices that have been field-proven in Fortune 500
  companies. Five key phases of the GSS Data Migration Services include Pre-Engagement
  Planning, to review the scope of the project, deliverables,
  methodology, and advise clients on overall migration objectives; Discovery,
  to conduct data collection and discover and audit the current
  environment; Design, to develop the precise migration solution
  and prepare a planning and design report; Implementation & Test,
  where pre-production migration testing, verification and validation is
  conducted, followed by performing the actual data migration, and
  ensuring that all storage systems, new and old, as well as
  applications, are all fully operational; and the Knowledge Transfer phase,
  where GSS provides comprehensive information on migration tools,
  designs and concepts and completes an overall project review. This
  approach ensures that a methodical, systematically orchestrated plan
  is developed and that the data migration is completed both seamlessly
  and efficiently and meets the client’s
  expectations. The Knowledge Transfer phase also ensures that the
  insight and skills required for the migration are transferred to the
  customer for future use.

• Hitachi Data Migration Expert Assistant: Data Migration Expert
  Assistant is an advanced Hitachi developed software application that
  assists in the planning and execution of data migration to remove the
  risk of human error and speed the planning process.
• Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager: Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager
  enables IT administrators to easily and interactively match
  application quality-of-service requirements to heterogeneous storage
  assets. The software provides non-disruptive movement of data volumes
  to match application-driven price, performance, and availability
  characteristics through an easy-to-use interface.
• Hitachi’s Leading Virtualization
  Technology: By implementing the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform
  V and Universal Storage Platform VM — the
  industry’s leading enterprise-class storage
  virtualization platforms — companies can
  seamlessly virtualize and aggregate data from existing storage
  systems, regardless of vendor, and migrate the data to new storage
  systems while the production applications continue running.

“ESG has found that a large number of end
users experience major problems when implementing data migrations
including extended or unexpected downtime, data loss and application
performance issues,” said Brian Babineau,
senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Many
users find migrating data to be a complex and time consuming process.
Traditional data migrations can be costly, disruptive, and risky.
Hitachi is aware of these challenges and is focusing its core
competencies, best practices, technology and professional services on
helping users to seamlessly and efficiently migrate data within
heterogeneous environments.”

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation