Better Utilization, Better Business: The Promise of Services Oriented Storage

At Hitachi Data Systems, Services Oriented Storage Solutions proceed from one very simple idea: that storage planning should center on the needs of users by aiming to meet or exceed the terms of service level agreements (SLAs). It's a user-centric model rather than one that's dictated by products or technology ¡X and the ideal result is a storage system that meets current and future business needs without over investing or under investing in technology.

The United States and other developed global economies have already begun to encounter difficulties in the consumer markets. Should increasing financial pressures extend into the business segment; enterprises will have to be even more cautious in planning their technology infrastructure. With more pressure to spend only what is absolutely necessary while minimizing IT complexity, increasing operational efficiency, and managing risk, the services oriented approach will be the most sensible way to address storage. Services Oriented Storage also allows organizations to respond more quickly to business and technology change and:

• Reduce cost and increase efficiency by reducing the complexity of their infrastructure and automating the process of storage management
• Centrally monitor and manage their multivendor storage environment
• Boost utilization and reduce oversubscription of storage resources
• Cost effectively address a growing range of data types and applications
• Improve availability, reliability and SLA consistency for midrange and small enterprise data applications
• Provide metrics and enable policies to measure and automate the use of storage services.

Hitachi Data Systems meets the unique demands of every customer through a full range of Services Oriented Storage Solutions. From specialty solutions like content archiving and storage virtualization? to business consolidation and business continuity? Hitachi Data Systems can help align storage infrastructure with business requirements so that IT always remains in step with the business as it grows and changes.

Services Oriented Storage and Virtualization

Services Oriented Storage from Hitachi Data Systems exploits the capabilities of virtualization to provide a platform that can be readily reconfigured and optimized to accommodate changing business requirements. In Services Oriented Storage, commonly required functions, such as copy, move, replication and thin provisioning, are available to multiple applications, server environments and storage environments. It is an approach that applies service oriented architecture (SOA) concepts to storage to reduce complexity and costs¡Xan approach enabled by the unique Hitachi controller-based virtualization capabilities.

When the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform? was first introduced, many organizations used its virtualization capabilities for the straightforward task of migrating volumes from old storage systems to new. Now IT leaders are more likely to make full use of the cost, performance, protection and management benefits that virtualization affords: namely, better utilization of tiered, heterogeneous storage infrastructures through common storage services.

Other storage virtualization solutions still focus on simple volume pooling, which ultimately doesn't deliver much value to customers. Hitachi Data Systems controller-based virtualization, a key component of our Services Oriented Storage approach enables intelligent tiered storage based on common management, data mobility, data protection and provisioning &mdash something that just wasn't possible under the old SAN model. This ability for virtualized storage systems to work together to optimize performance, protection, availability and cost is unique within the industry and can only be accomplished by the purpose-built, multiprocessor storage platform from Hitachi, supported by a large dynamic global cache and a rich menu of storage and data services.

Services Oriented Storage in Action

Our Services Oriented Storage touches every part of the storage enterprise ¡X from hardware and software to consulting, design and implementation services. From tiered storage to active archives, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that help you do more with less - reduce complexity, control costs, and maximize the effectiveness of your storage investment ¡X while delivering superior levels of service. Our solutions fall into the following broad categories:

Storage Management, to help you manage your storage infrastructure effectively and provide optimal quality of service
Tiered Storage, to better match storage resources with data based on business value, frequency of access, and other considerations
Network Attached Storage, to better consolidate and manage attached storage capacity
Business Continuity, to mitigate risk and keep your company operating even in the event of a disaster
Active Archiving, to help you meet regulatory and corporate compliance requirements for data preservation

The Roots of Services Oriented Storage

Services Oriented Storage addresses the problem of low utilization — and for over ten years, Hitachi Data Systems has been investigating new and novel ways to accomplish this, with the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and Universal Storage Platform VM being the technology leaders in storage today.

In 1995, Hitachi Freedom 7700 Series enterprise storage systems introduced the ability to dynamically change storage configurations within a global cache. Five years later, the Lightning 9900™ freed the control unit from the restrictions of shared busses and point-to-point connections in order to scale to meet the increasing demands for SAN connectivity and scalability.

By 2002, the Hitachi Lightning 9900 V Series introduced virtual storage ports, which helped improve allocation rates across server types and applications. At this time, Hitachi also introduced a suite of management tools that could look into a heterogeneous SAN to discover, visualize, monitor utilization and chargeback usage of resources.

And, with the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform, introduced in 2005, controller-based virtualization became a reality.

Every step of the way, our Services Oriented Storage has helped customers to massively consolidate and optimize their infrastructure while greatly reducing cost, complexity and management. We expect nothing less in the future.