How do you buy a storage system? Not too many years ago you probably bought a fully configured, storage system, and depreciated it over 3 years. You only needed less than a third of the capacity when you bought it, but capacity was cheap and you figured that your workload would increase and you would […]

Unlike other thin provisioning solutions, HDP, or Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, supports other vendor’s storage that are attached, or virtualized, behind the USP V or VM. Since it is provided as a service on the USP V/VM, it can aggregate thin provisioning with other common storage services provided on this platform. This Services Oriented Approach to HDP not only provides […]

Earth Day 2008 will be celebrated on April 22 with observations scheduled around the world. This year’s theme is “A Call for Climate” a global warming action theme. While there may still be skeptics about global warning, there is no disputing the rising cost of energy, as I fill my Prius with $3.89 per gallon gas […]

The increasing explosion of data is driving the need to reduce what we store, not only to reduce the capital cost for storage capacity but also to reduce the operational costs of managing an ever increasing amount of data. 
In response the storage industry has developed technologies like compression, single instance store, and de-duplication which are […]

As we go into year 2008, this quotation from Yogi Berra, keeps playing in my head. 2008 is beginning a lot like 2001. If you remember 2001 we just came off a year where storage capacity grew by 100% over the growth in 1999. This growth was due to the dot com boom and the […]

The “Green tech” movement and increasing focus on IT budgets is driving a growing awareness of storage deficiencies. The storage of data has become highly inefficient, with low utilization, over allocation, stranded storage, too many redundant copies, low access speeds, inefficient search, and disruptive movement and migration. Actual utilization of storage is less than […]

This Monday, Hitachi announced the availability of Dynamic Provisioning also known as thin provisioning as a service for heterogeneous storage systems that are attached to the USP V and USPVM.  This means that enterprises can now deploy thin provisioning to any system that attaches to the USP V platform. No need to wait for EMC […]

Last week at SNW, one of the hottest topics was “Green”. Every vendor promoted their “Green” technology, which often was nothing more than the use of larger capacity disks or tapes to replace lower capacity disks. While I agree that any thing that enables us to store more data capacity for less power consumption […]

Last week I was invited to attend the Wal-Mart Living Better Sustainability Summit which was held in Rodgers Arkansas for their suppliers. This meeting was chaired by their CEO Lee Scott and his management team. I was hosted by Nancy Stewart their CTO and Rita Carney, VP of Applications Enablement. Wal-Mart launched their Sustainability program […]

As we move into the year end quarter, IT folks are reviewing their storage investments to determine what leases are expiring and what has been capitalized and needs to be refreshed. As they review their situation it occurs to them that the replacement of storage will be a much more difficult task than it was the last […]