Innovation - Storage News and Trends

May 2008

Decreasing Cost of Ownership and Boosting Return on Investment through Hitachi Services Oriented Storage Solutions

With many economic indicators pointing to difficult financial times ahead — both in the U.S. and globally, across a host of industries — large organizations and enterprises will need to find more and better ways to extract value from their IT infrastructures. At the same time, storage volumes continue to grow rapidly even though IT organizations seldom see commensurate growth in their budgets.

Storage economics is a discipline that applies an economic framework to the world of data storage in order to discover better, more efficient techniques for controlling costs while delivering an acceptable level of service. A combination of best practices, tiered storage, consolidation, and virtualization can collectively enable companies to lower both short term capital expenses (CAPEX) and the cost of ongoing operating expenses, or OPEX, leading to potentially lower total costs of ownership (TCO) and better returns on investment (ROI).

Services Oriented Storage Solutions from Hitachi Data Systems 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.

Low Cost Storage Is Not a Panacea

An organization looking to lower overall costs may at first simply consider purchasing lower-cost storage solutions. But this approach alone will not answer the fundamental question of how to do more with less. In fact, cheaper disk solutions may reduce short term capital expense (CAPEX) but produce a negative long term impact on operational expenses (OPEX) due to performance and management inefficiencies.

Similarly, single tiered storage can provide short-term benefits in certain instances, but may be more expensive over the long term. The single tiered approach may be most cost effective for lower aggregate capacities, but as growth increases the total cost leader becomes multitiered storage.

Multitiered Storage Can Enable CAPEX and OPEX Reductions

Through judicious use of multitiered storage, IT planners can reduce or even avoid future storage procurement costs by separating different tiers’ rate of growth. Moving much of the capacity growth demand to a lower tiered solution reduces CAPEX costs. Meanwhile, improving utilization on higher storage tiers provides relatively greater savings than focusing resources on those same utilization improvements in lower tiered, less costly storage.

Risks, Missed Opportunities and Other Costs

An organization must also consider opportunity costs and the cost of business risks that accompany a change in storage strategy. For example, a separately tiered, robust archive can help a business more fully and easily comply with industry regulations, and therefore avoid or reduce the cost of litigation, data discovery, or legal penalties.

Similarly, a stable and optimized storage infrastructure can reduce the risk of lost data, labor time and effort involved in a data migration. An efficiently run infrastructure requires less human labor to manage and maintain and allows personnel to direct their resources at those areas of the infrastructure with the greatest value to the business.

ROI versus TCO

Return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) both reflect the economic value of a proposed purchasing decision. Although the two are frequently treated as interchangeable in vendor marketing literature, ROI and TCO have very different purposes.

ROI is effective when challenging the status quo with a proposition to replace an existing solution. For example, an IT planner who believes that an investment will reduce long term operating expenses may use an ROI analysis to flesh out the financial pros and cons of the decision. The analysis illustrates the size of the investment, the time frame for recouping it, and the expected net savings.

TCO analysis is best used to compare two or more possible options. The analysis places the total lifetime operating and purchasing costs of the assets side by side for comparison. IT purchasing best practices, documented by independent analysts, frequently cite the importance of including a TCO analysis in any competitive bid situation.

Hot Topics	Expert Insight	Best Practices
Tiered Storage Economics	Converting Unstructured Data	Video Testimonial
As IT departments and storage planners continue to look at best practices and technologies to proactively reduce ownership costs, a tiered storage approach should be investigated and presented as a viable option for future storage strategies.	Our new file and content services products help organizations improve their storage efficiency and increase productivity by providing the ability to simultaneously search both active and historical information across the enterprise.	Foothill-De Anza Community College District Chief of Police Ronald Levine chose Hitachi Simple Modular Storage over EMC, HP and NetApp "because of performance, reliability, ease of use and to maximize our return on investment."
Read the White Paper		View the Success Story

In this Edition

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Events

White Papers:

Tiered Storage Economics: Defining and Calculating the Economic Benefit of Tiered Storage Solutions More...

Storage Economics: Hitachi Universal Storage Platform More...

Storage Economics: Identifying and Reducing Operating Expenses in the Storage Infrastructure More...

Case Study:

Hitachi Storage Solutions at Work: HDFC Bank Chooses Tiered Storage Solutions, Transfers DAS to SAN for real time benefits

Blog post:

The Greening of IT: Oxymoron or Journey to a New Reality
Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems

Articles:

SNW 08: Storage must cut energy use
ITPro More...

Hitachi's new channel focus
CRN Australia More...

SNIA Europe Academy — May 15, 2008, Paris, France

The SNIA Europe Academy events will focus on the key technology areas and issues facing storage professionals today including: positioning IP Storage solutions alongside Fibre Channel, unravelling the myths surrounding Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and introducing the latest thinking around systems management and data security in the IT storage arena. More...

Storage Decisions Chicago — May 13-15, 2008, Hilton Downtown Chicago

At Storage Decisions, the world’s leading independent storage experts will show you how your peers are meeting the challenges you face. The 3-day, 6 track agenda will delve in-depth into the practical application of these “new” technologies and concepts — as well as provide the latest tips and advice on more traditional storage technology and practice. More...

Networking Considerations for Optimizing Replication, May 21, 2008, 9am PST, online

Hitachi Data Systems Tom Neidhardt, Senior Product and Solution Marketing Manager, and Mark Detrick, Solutions Architect, Extension and Routing, Brocade will discuss the various factors to consider when designing the network to optimize the network for replication. We will look at how to optimize the number of paths, parameters to consider during configuration for both storage and the network routers as well as bandwidth. More...

Managing External Virtualized Storage with Hitachi Device Manager, June 18, 2008, 9am PST, online

John Marotta, e-Learning specialist for the Hitachi Data Systems Academy organization, will discuss how to effectively simplify the management of external storage through the use of Device Manager Logical Groups. More...

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