Innovation - Storage News and Trends

February 2008

Virtualization Delivers Simplicity, Efficiency and Better Service to Business

Virtualization’s popularity — both as a buzzword and as a practice — has been growing for several years now, and it’s changing enterprise leaders’ expectations and approach to getting the most out of their technology assets. Briefly put, storage virtualization simplifies management and improves efficiency by masking the underlying physical complexity of today’s storage infrastructures.

Storage virtualization enables organizations to leverage a common pool of storage resources and provides core functionality including:

		Managing heterogeneous storage environments.

		Nondisruptive data migration.

		Local and remote replication.

		Provisioning storage.
		Integration of low-cost disk storage into high performance environments.

		Consolidation of diverse storage environments.

Hitachi Data Systems storage and virtualization solutions help customers simplify infrastructure, ensure quality of service (QoS), reduce risk and align storage tiers with business needs. With that, enterprises can dramatically reduce capital expenditures and operational costs.

Virtualization at Work:

The IT professionals and analyst communities have long recognized the value of virtualization. But historically, they have struggled to find a product that seamlessly integrates the consolidation benefits of storage virtualization with the efficiency, power, and cooling advantages of thin provisioning. That’s why the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ V is such a breakthrough: it represents the world’s first implementation of a large scale, enterprise-class virtualization layer combined with thin provisioning software.

The Universal Storage Platform family is unique because it puts virtualization in the storage controller rather than the host or the SAN. Controller—based virtualization allows enterprise organizations to leverage their existing storage investments, no matter which products they’re using — making it the ideal choice for any organization with a heterogeneous storage environment.

Not only does the Universal Storage Platform offer breakthrough virtualization technology, it’s also the first to be certified by VMware under its new external storage virtualization hardware certification program.

The Future:

Storage virtualization is part of a larger industry trend towards a services oriented data center. Whether at the application layer, infrastructure layer, or storage layer, organizations need a dynamic, flexible services oriented data center that can adapt and grow with the changing requirements of the business.

Virtualization and Services Oriented Storage Solutions : The Connection

Services Oriented Storage Solutions is a business-centric framework for aligning IT storage resources with constantly changing business requirements. It provides a dynamic, flexible platform of integrated storage services enabling organizations and users to optimize storage infrastructure while reducing cost and complexity.

Because storage virtualization achieves many of the same objectives — namely, simplification of management and closer IT-business alignment — virtualization-enabled systems like the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform(tm) V provide an integral component of the Services Oriented Storage Solutions architecture.

Hitachi is committed to helping organizations of all sizes reduce IT cost and complexity, manage risk, and increase operational efficiency by delivering services oriented storage solutions that closely align a full range of storage requirements with a single integrated platform that includes virtualization, common management, tiered storage and common data protection.

Learn About the Future of Data Storage at Inspire Life — London

Inspire Life — London brings together the Hitachi, Ltd. family of businesses under one roof to offer insight into the future of Hitachi technology. As part of this exhibition, Hitachi Data Systems will be presenting a pan-EMEA partner and customer event called Inspire Storage.

At Inspire Storage, you can learn about:

		Hitachi Data Systems business direction and channel strategy for 2008.

		How Hitachi Data Systems technology platforms and Services Oriented Storage Solutions are enabling businesses to benefit from storage virtualization, data protection, green IT and high performance IT infrastructure solutions and services.

You can also meet Hitachi Data Systems executives and Inspire Storage partners in seminars and in the Inspire Storage exhibition zone.

Inspire Life — London takes place February 20 and 21, 2008, at the QEII Conference Centre in London. Customer Day is February 20; Partner Day is February 21. For more information, visit www.inspirestorage.com

Hot Topics	Expert Insight	Best Practices
Inspire Life—The Future of Data Storage	Ask the SMB Expert	WebTech Series: Thin Provisioning
The Inspire Life in London, on 20 and 21 February 2008, will bring together the Hitachi, Ltd. family of businesses under one roof to offer insight into the future of Hitachi technology. Register Now	Have a question about how to solve your SMB storage challenges? The people at Hitachi have researched the market and know the solutions to your problems. Receive Expert Insight	Business have long been faced with rapid growth in storage, requiring continuous requests for configuring and provisioning addition disk space. Our answers could help you, too. View the Archive

In this Edition

Get the Facts

Events

In the Blogs:

Four Ways to Increase Storage Efficiency.

Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems. More...

Podcast:

Intelligent Tiered Storage - No Need to Wait!

Hu Yoshida discusses challenges organizations have with tiered storage and virtualization. More...

Case Study:

Tiered Storage and Virtualization in the Real World.

Briefing Paper:

Using Storage Virtualization to Meet the Challenges of Rapid Data Growth. More...

Overview Brochure:

Hitachi Universal Storage Platform. More...

Microsoft Launch Wave Event 2008, Los Angeles February 27, 2008

Hitachi is one of a few platinum sponsors behind this major Microsoft announcement. More...

HIMSS, February 24—28, 2008, Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL

The annual conference of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society, with keynote speakers Dr. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, and Steven Levitt, bestselling author of Freakonomics. More...

SHARE, February 24—29, 2008, Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, FL

SHARE provides the most up−to−date information on major issues taking place in enterprise technology. There are numerous sessions that cover virtualization and provide sound advice for the proactive, informed IT professional. More...

CeBIT, March 4—9, 2008, Hannover Exhibition Center, Hannover, Germany

The world’s largest trade fair for digital solutions and the leading platform for global conferences. More...

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