Innovation - Storage News and Trends

July 2008

Storage Virtualization Grows Up: A Simplified Path to Better Utilization and Ease of Management

Storage virtualization is part of two larger, ongoing storage industry trends. First, storage processing functions are moving nearer to the actual data being processed. Second, as hardware becomes more of a commodity, the leaders will be those companies who succeed in separating the "brains" of systems from their hardware "bodies". Hitachi Data Systems controller-based virtualization technology accomplishes both these things by delivering a wide range of storage related intelligence and services from the controller.

Storage virtualization's detractors argue that it's too complex, adds latency, does not scale and does not work well with direct attached storage, virtual servers, mainframes and thin provisioning. While this may be true of a SAN-based approach, the Hitachi Data Systems controller-based approach to virtualization mitigates many of these problems.

By putting virtualization in the controller rather than the SAN, we can mask the complexity without introducing another layer of management. This also allows lower level storage systems to benefit from the performance and services of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ by enabling the aggregation of content and file services.

Simply put 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 as part of our Services Oriented Storage strategy. In so doing, enterprises can dramatically reduce capital expenditure and operational costs.

Virtualization and the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform

The enterprise storage community has known for a long time that virtualization is a potentially very valuable technology – but they've struggled to find a product that offers 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.

Unlike other storage systems, the Universal Storage Platform family 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 was also the first to be certified by VMware under its new external storage virtualization hardware certification program.

How Virtualization Helped United Airlines

United Airlines has been a pioneer in the implementation of advanced storage systems, including the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform family. The United Airlines IT department ran extensive tests on the Universal Storage Platform V to test its virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning capabilities, and found that results not only met but also exceeded their expectations for performance and ease of management.

United Airlines is now proceeding with a plan to take advantage of these new technologies and integrate them into their IT strategies. They recognize that Dynamic Provisioning software can help them save money and operate more efficiently, now. The power and virtualization of the Universal Storage Platform V and Dynamic Provisioning simplifies their storage management and moves them closer to the reality of storage systems that self-manage and self-optimize.

Virtualization Brings Out the Benefits of Tiered Storage

Virtualization helps organizations make better use of a variety of storage options, including lower cost modular storage. It allows data to migrate easily between different tiers of storage, and lets an organization leverage a single replication engine and a single management interface across all storage assets, regardless of their cost, type, or functionality. In other words, it can work as both the "glue" holding together different tiers of storage and the "grease" helping data move more easily between those tiers.

Hot Topics	Expert Insight	Best Practices
Everything You Wanted to Know About Virtualization, But Were Afraid to Ask.	Services Oriented Storage Solutions and the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ VM.	The cost and effort of supporting continuously growing data volumes are impeding IT's ability to meet business requirements.
Visit the Storage Virtualization Resource Center	Read the analyst report from Illuminata	Read the Best Practices for Application Centric Storage Management

In this Edition

Get the Facts

Events

In the Blogs:

Which Virtualization Technologies are ripe: — According to Forrester?
Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems More...

Podcast:

Enterprise virtualization: Making it a reality
Organizations are aggressively moving forward to make their IT dynamic by introducing virtualization to their server, storage, application, and desktop environments. How are we planning for this? What are our specific goals and priorities? Given that we are touching almost all areas of Enterprise IT at the same time, are we setting ourselves up for failure? More...

White Paper:

Solving the Top Six Enterprise Storage Issues: Learn How to Meet the Challenges of Rapid Data Growth with Storage Virtualization More...

Case Study:

Tiered Storage and Virtualization in the Real World

Overview Brochure:

Hitachi Universal Storage Platform
More...

SNIA 2008 Summer Symposium, July 21-24, 2008, Sainte Claire Hotel, San Jose

The Symposium will be an opportunity for all SNIA members to participate in various Committee, Forum, Technical Work Group and Birds of a Feather Sessions. More...

Get some SATAsfaction! Learn When to Deploy and What Types of Workloads Are Suitable for SATA II Drives, August 6, 2008, 9am PST, online

Investing a few minutes in learning how and when to deploy SATA II drives can save your company money while ensuring that your applications meet their SLA requirements. Hear from Dan Hood, Director, Enterprise Storage Product Management, on how SATA II drives can provide a new tier of archival storage while reducing heating, cooling and floor space costs for mainframe and open systems data. More...

Eliminate Rogue Data from NAS and Archive: A Primer on Enterprise Search, July 30, 2008, 9am PST, online

In this session, you'll hear from Michael Hay, Senior Director of Product Strategy and Jeff Lundberg, Senior Product Marketing Manager, as they examine the content indexing, federated enterprise search, archiving, data management, e-discovery, self-service file restore and other features of the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite with a focus on solving compliance challenges, preparing for litigation and improving productivity for all users, not just executives and administrators. More...

Hitachi Replication Manager: Business Continuity Management Framework, August 20, 2008, 9am PDT, online

Hitachi's new Replication Manager enables customers to centrally manage their in-system or remote business continuity products, for both mainframe and open environments. Hear from Cindy Martinage, Software Designer — Replication Suite and Bobby Crouch, Product Marketing Manager, on how Hitachi Replication Manager simplifies replication operations, configurations, task management and automation. This uniquely integrated solution allows customers to closely monitor their critical storage components and allow better management of RPO and RTO objectives. More...

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