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Hitachi Data Systems : Customer Newsletter

February 2009 

Storage Management Software Reduces Costs, Simplifies Management and Improves Resource Utilization

Storage Management Software Reduces Costs, Simplifies Management and Improves Resource UtilizationThe current economic environment demands that businesses find ways to decrease costs and increase efficiency at every level of the organization—from staffing all the way through technology infrastructure. In the field of data storage, a number of innovations point the way to improved resource utilization and greater simplification of formerly complicated processes, helping bring down the overall cost of storage.

Some solutions may involve a wholesale overhaul of the storage infrastructure, requiring a relatively large upfront hardware investment in exchange for future savings in total cost of ownership. Other solutions are relatively nondisruptive, can work with existing heterogeneous storage infrastructures, and create incremental but measurable reductions in cost.

The Hitachi Storage Command Suite belongs to this latter category of solutions. This combination of services oriented storage management software and services allows businesses to reduce storage infrastructure complexity, costs, and risk while maintaining service levels and dynamically aligning IT resources to business needs.

For businesses looking to maximize their return on existing investments, Hitachi Storage Command Suite software offers a way to more effectively manage their entire storage infrastructure while providing high levels of service. It supports mainframe, open and mixed heterogeneous storage environments, and leverages a single platform to manage all application data with a common set of tools.

A good storage management implementation that reduces administrative costs and improves application performance justifies its own cost of investment through hard dollar reductions in storage total cost of ownership. Storage management helps administrators manage greater volumes of storage, makes better use of existing storage capacity, and defers additional purchases. By helping to improve the performance and availability of revenue generating business applications, storage management delivers valuable benefits to the bottom line.

Full Insight from a Single Pane of Glass

Full Insight from a Single Pane of GlassHitachi Storage Command Portal software is a new product that lets users group and report on storage resources by application or business function. This enables comprehensive reporting on Hitachi storage environments and assures that service-level objectives are met. From the Storage Command Portal, storage administrators can monitor and report on dynamic storage services, performance problem management services, and storage configuration services.

Create Virtual Storage Pools with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software creates a virtual storage pool that can be allocated to an application without actually being physically mapped until the moment it is used. By decoupling storage provisioning from the physical addition of storage capacity, organizations can achieve higher rates of storage utilization. Provisioning software from a virtual pool cuts both administrative costs and downtime by reducing the amount of time needed to provision storage and by allowing storage administrators to add physical storage without planned outages.

Agentless Storage Capacity Reporting

Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter Software, powered by APTARE®, provides a host application view of storage usage but does not use a host based agent. It reports on storage utilization at the host and application levels, providing comprehensive insight into both overused and underutilized storage resources. In short, Storage Capacity Reporter simplifies reporting, which allows organizations to maximize their storage utilization and reduce costs where possible.

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Join the discussion on storage architectures and where they are headed.
Expert Insight
Services Oriented Storage is a strategy that aligns storage resources with business needs.
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Events

 Case Study:
Case Study on Dynamic Provisioning at University HealthSystem Consortium

 Analyst Report:
Hitachi Storage Command Suite a "Best-in-Class Storage Management Suite" By IDC

 Datasheet:
Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter Software More...

 In the Blogs:
10 Trends for 2009
By Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems More...

 

Free Unused Storage with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning Zero Page Reclaim Feature, February 4, 2009, 9am PST, online
Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software frees up unused storage. For existing volumes being migrated to virtual volumes, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software now supports the capability to do 'Zero Page Reclaim'. This means after a volume has been migrated via Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager or other means, the volume's physical capacity can be examined. Where the firmware determines that no data other than zeros is found on a Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning pool page, then the physical storage is unmapped and 'returned' to the pool's free capacity. More...

Using Hitachi Protection Manager and Hitachi Storage Cluster to provide a complete Rapid Recovery and Disaster Recovery Solution for your Microsoft Exchange and SQL Environments, February 11, 2009, 9am PST, online
Hitachi Data Systems provides solutions that can help you recover your Microsoft® environments. Hitachi Protection Manager software provides rapid recovery for Microsoft environments including both SQL and Exchange. Hitachi Storage Cluster software uses disk-based replication to enable robust site-wide cluster failover. If you have Microsoft Exchange and/or SQL business requirements that dictate your enterprise has both rapid recoverability of critical databases and complete "lights out" site failover for business critical applications, then this session is for you. More...

Storage Decisions Seminar: Storage Virtualization, March 3, 2009, DoubleTree Metropolitan, New York, NY
During this one-day event, Stephen Foskett, director of Contoural's Data Practice, will explore the benefits and drawbacks of the burgeoning technology of storage virtualization and its ability to change the economics of storage. You will hear how virtualization has progressed from vaporware to an actual concept that storage managers are using to minimize the number of machines they need to manage and centralize data. Foskett will look at how storage virtualization makes heterogeneous storage compatible, eases data migration, and enables consolidation. More...

Optimizing your storage infrastructure for Microsoft Exchange Archiving with the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, March 11, 2009, 9am PST, online
In this session, Marc Trimuschat, senior director of File Services, and Everett Dolgner, senior Archive Integration architect, will discuss how to architect and deploy an active-archiving environment for Microsoft Exchange using the Hitachi Content Archive Platform and other Hitachi storage solutions. We'll share best practices and sizing guidelines to help you decide which combination of Hitachi Data Systems and partner offerings might help in your environment. More...

Interop, May 17-21, 2009, Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV
The Storage track will help explain how key storage and storage network technologies work together to drive your business. We have sessions that will appeal to the business executive as well as sessions that are more technical and comprehensive for IT technical staff. Storage Application, Storage Technologies and Storage Networks will be the track's main focus. More...