Hitachi extends software, services capabilities

BANGALORE, INDIA: Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and a provider of services oriented storage solutions, today announced the extension of its software and services capabilities.

Coupled with the recently announced Switch IT On program, the enhancements could help customers improve the efficiency of their existing environments by reclaiming storage capacity across all storage tiers, said a press release.

Customers have realized up to 200 TB in reclaimed storage capacity and CAPEX savings upwards of $2M, thereby deferring future storage purchases.

Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer, Hitachi Data Systems said, “Today’s software and services announcement is part of our focus to help our customers do more with less.”

He added that dynamic provisioning simplifies operations by replacing the management of hundreds of volumes with the management of one or two pools of virtual capacity. It can also reclaim capacity on existing open systems volumes without disruption for significant cost savings that go straight to customers’ bottom line.

The new capabilities include:

·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

· 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.