Christophe's Corner

What about increasing your cost savings, automating performance optimization and making data storage easier to provision? Good news today, since Hitachi Data Systems strikes again with great updates for its customers.

I’d like to focus more specifically on our expanded support in the field of Dynamic Provisioning, a capability which will soon be generally available on our modular systems. We’ve had this for a while on our enterprise USP V and USP VM platforms and we are now expanding support to our modular product line.

Why should you care as a customer or prospect? In essence our rendition of dynamic provisioning (some call it “thin provisioning”) simplifies and adds operational agility to the storage administration process. It also lets customers purchase less storage capacity up front, deferring storage capacity upgrades in line with actual business usage. This results in operating costs savings (electricity and floor space) associated with keeping unused disk capacity spinning.

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software also provides performance improvements through proprietary automatic optimized wide-striping of data across all available disks. Unlike our competitors, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software runs on industry-leading Hitachi storage systems and is integrated with their advanced capabilities.

From a technology and operational standpoint, Dynamic Provisioning software allows storage to be allocated to an application without actually being physically mapped until it is used. This means the software allows storage allocations to exceed the amount of storage physically installed. It also means that the provisioning of storage to an application and the physical addition of storage are decoupled.

Putting a business hat on, you can net it out as a capability that extends the life of existing assets through higher utilization and that fosters major reduction of operations management cost and increased storage provisioning agility.

And remember that you can do all of this on systems that are already best in class…