Enhanced HDS Thin Provisioning Software

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation introduced unique capabilities across software and services to enable customers to reclaim underutilized storage capacity and increase the return on their assets. This announcement highlights the company’s strategic Global Services capabilities to further extend the economic and optimization benefits customers can achieve leveraging Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning technology.

Coupled with the recently announced Switch IT On program, the enhancements can help customers improve the efficiency of their existing environments by reclaiming storage capacity across all storage tiers. Customers have realized up to 200 TB in reclaimed storage capacity and CAPEX savings upwards of $2M, thereby deferring future storage purchases.

Specifically, Hitachi Data Systems
announced the following innovative capabilities:

• Zero Page Reclaim – examines volumes of physical capacity on or on storage connected to the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform, returns unused storage blocks back to the storage pool and reclaims storage space
• Industry First Enterprise-Class Automatic Dynamic Rebalancing – when physical volumes are added to expand a Dynamic Provisioning pool of storage, existing virtual volumes in the pool are automatically re-striped across these new physical volumes to rebalance the workload. Hitachi Data Systems is the only enterprise-class storage vendor that automatically rebalances the pages of a virtual volume so they are actively re-striped to take advantage of new disks when the pool is expanded.
• Support for the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family – brings the advantages of dynamic provisioning such as cost savings, automated performance optimization and easy provisioning, to Hitachi midrange customers.
• Storage Reclamation Service – assesses the customer’s environment, plans the new dynamic provisioned environment, migrates the data and reclaims unused capacity with Zero Page Reclaim without disruption to the application, thereby deferring CAPEX and increasing ROA.

“Storage economics, our best practices for helping companies assess their storage requirements and investment returns through true ownership cost, has never been more critical to enterprises and thin provisioning can play an integral role in saving organizations money while improving operational efficiency,” said Hu Yoshida, Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Data Systems. “Today’s software and services announcement is part of our focus to help our customers do more with less. Dynamic provisioning simplifies operations by replacing the management of hundreds of volumes with the management of one or two pools of virtual capacity. Dynamic provisioning can also reclaim capacity on existing open systems volumes without disruption for significant cost savings that go straight to customers’ bottom line.”

New Hitachi Storage Reclamation Service
Hitachi Data Systems has extensive experience helping customers take advantage of its dynamic provisioning technologies to increase utilization, reduce the cost of storage growth and extend the life of storage assets. Through the Storage Reclamation Service, customers can gain the benefit of this experience to accelerate time to results with lower risk. Key aspects of the service include:

• End-to-end Service – includes assessment, planning, design, migration and storage reclamation
• Quick Analysis – to show the type of benefits that customers can expect, Hitachi Data Systems can perform a quick analysis of a sampling of a customer’s environment
• Shared Risk – to lower the risk to customers*, Hitachi Data Systems will perform the assessment in a shared risk model, where customers pay only if Hitachi Data Systems exceeds the pre-set customer expectations for storage to be reclaimed.

"In today’s challenging economic conditions, enterprise customers are seeking to create highly-efficient storage environments that reduce cost and extend the value of existing investments," said Brad Nisbet, Program Manager, IDC Storage Services Research. “With the Storage Reclamation Service, Hitachi Data Systems is creating a services package built on a strong technology portfolio of storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning, affording customers the opportunity to reduce capital and operational expenses more quickly and with less risk."

Carter Lee, Vice President of Technology Operations, Overstock.com, said: "Hitachi Data Systems has quickly simplified the process of non-disruptively provisioning storage. With Hitachi virtualization technologies, we’ve seen storage capacity savings of 50 percent on some arrays, now provision storage in 25 percent of the time, and have increased utilization rates by over 30 percent. We’ve reduced data migration related down-time from several hours to less than 30 minutes. Overall, by using Hitachi virtualization, dynamic provisioning and tiered storage, we’ve reduced our capital and operating costs for an improved return on our storage investment."

Steve Carlberg, Principal Network Administrator, University HealthSystem Consortium, said: “University HealthSystem Consortium leverages Hitachi Data Systems for the functionality and scalability needed for a large and growing healthcare consortium, while providing an easy to manage system for IT staff. Hitachi virtualization technologies give us the flexibility and cost efficiency to run many heterogeneous applications, databases and workloads concurrently off of a single virtualized storage pool. With Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning we have reclaimed 40 percent of our storage capacity, have increased storage utilization rates and pushed out new storage acquisitions."