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May 21, 2007
Hitachi Introduces Services Oriented Storage Solutions
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SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 14 -- Hitachi Data Systems Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., today announced the industry’s first Services Oriented Storage Solutions, long-awaited industry breakthroughs that enable storage to be provisioned and charged back according to business needs, not technology constraints. Based on the all-new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and a multitude of new Hitachi Storage Software innovations, this announcement marks a new era in storage where the historical norm of locking in data, function, personnel and operations to rigid structures, and forcing users to pay for services that go unused, is replaced by the emergence of storage services that directly tie resources and functionality to business demands.
In today’s storage climate, administrators and business professionals must choose between a "one-size-fits-all" approach -- where the most demanding service level agreements define core functionality -- or a "mix-match-and-manage" solution -- where complex combinations of incompatible hardware, software and processes are the norm. Neither of these solutions adequately meets the needs of the business or IT. Business units do not want to pay for services that they don’t need; however, IT has had little choice but to overprovision the infrastructure in order to not fail on critical service level agreements (SLAs).
Hitachi Services Oriented Storage Solutions will dramatically alter the current stranglehold that storage architectures have on business flexibility by unleashing a services-oriented approach and specific functionality that enables business units and IT to tailor storage services to business needs and ensure that business units only pay for what is actually used.
Introducing Services Oriented Storage: Choice in the Hands of Business and IT
The information technology industry is full of examples where monolithic legacy applications are being modernized by constructing loosely coupled sets of services that can be invoked by applications as needed. Hitachi, with the introduction of its new services architecture, brings this vision to storage. Services Oriented Storage Solutions applies service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts to storage to deliver a platform that offers sets of automated functions delivered as services to the business which can be invoked as needed. Companies now have the means to replace inefficient capacity-based chargeback models with models that apply more relevant metrics and better “monetize” all of the storage-based services they provide across the enterprise, delivering substantial breakthroughs in efficiency and business agility.
“Beyond providing data migration, replication and storage aggregation, storage virtualization must enable common storage services so that dynamic business process requirements and their instantiated applications can use a common, managed heterogeneous storage infrastructure,” said Carl Greiner, senior vice president of infrastructure and software at OVUM. “The elimination of unique storage solutions and management to address each storage requirement will maximize leverage and lead to a truly optimized storage infrastructure. The realized benefit of storage virtualization will be the enablement of a common, consolidated, leveraged, dynamic and managed portfolio of heterogeneous storage services.”
The newly announced Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V packages and delivers key storage services such as:
- Business continuity services.
- Content management services (search, indexing via the Hitachi Content Archive Platform).
- Non-disruptive data migration.
- Volume management across heterogeneous storage arrays.
- Dynamic “Thin” Provisioning.
- Storage security services (e.g., immutability, logging, auditing, data shredding).
- Data de-duplication (via the Hitachi Virtual Tape Library solution).
- I/O load balancing.
- Data classification.
- File management services.
Hitachi Services Oriented Storage Solutions offer companies the ability to present business clients with a menu of storage attributes such as performance, availability, cost and security, and charge for those services based on the client’s selection.
“The most interesting and compelling feature of Hitachi’s strategy is that management metrics -- quality-of-service (QoS), service level objective/agreement (SLO/SLA), and recovery point objective (RPO) are applied across all services layers,” said John Webster, principal IT adviser at Illuminata. “Seeing enterprise storage in the context of deliverable services is key to unlocking both the realizable and chargeable value of virtualized storage.”
“IT managers can use capabilities like those included in Hitachi’s Services Oriented Storage Solutions to change the interaction between IT departments and their business customers,” said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC. “IT managers can shift the emphasis of their discussions from infrastructure impediments to the business services required to support rapid application deployment, greater resiliency and ongoing cost-of-use.”
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Source: Hitachi Data Systems Corp.
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