Hitachi announces availability of thin provisioning

Hitachi first to transform the environmental characteristics of externally attached storage systems; offers customers power, cooling, space, and thin provisioning advantages with dynamic provisioning services

Building on the worldwide success of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, Hitachi has announced several significant storage software and performance enhancements that will enable enterprises to vastly improve the environmental characteristics of their existing multi-vendor storage assets. Hitachi is enabling customers to extend all of the power, cooling, space, and thin provisioning advantages of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning as a service to externally attached storage systems - an industry first.

Hitachi also announced today that the Universal Storage Platform V shatters the 4 million input output operations per second (IOPS) benchmark for maximum performance.  Driving improved storage economics and unparalleled flexibility in tiered storage environments, Hitachi also announced the availability of native internal support for 750 gigabyte (GB) SATA II hard disk drives.

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software delivers green halo effect to storage virtualisation

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software enables customers to allocate virtual disk storage based on their anticipated future requirements without dedicating physical disk storage up front. If the need for additional physical disk arises, capacity can be purchased at a later time-at a lower cost-and implementation occurs transparently, without any disruption to mission-critical applications.  Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software delivers several important benefits to customers including reduced space, power and cooling costs achieved by eliminating the management overhead of allocated but unused disk space, that is often replicated many times for backup or other operational purposes.

Now, only the capacity that is required to hold the actual data is provisioned and replicated, requiring fewer physical disks resulting in lower carbon footprints. Not only does this provide significant improvements in capacity utilisation, it also takes the guess work out of allocating storage capacity, reduces the risk of out of space conditions, and facilitates the acquisition planning for future growth.

Hitachi Data Systems unique ability to provide a heterogeneous platform for all storage services is further enhanced with Dynamic Provisioning.  Now, thin provisioning can be applied as a new storage service for all devices attached to the Universal Storage Platform V and Universal Storage Platform VM, and better yet, they all can be centrally managed and treated as one virtual pool of data storage.

As a core part of Hitachis Services Oriented Storage Solutions framework, only Hitachi can equip customers existing storage assets with capabilities they were never designed to encompass, such as thin provisioning, thereby making virtualised storage systems greener, lowering customers power and cooling consumption rates and increasing the utilisation of storage capacity, said Claus Mikkelsen, chief scientist, Hitachi Data Systems. Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software can also potentially eliminate the need to re-provision LUNs as they grow.

Hitachi: The hands-down champion in enterprise storage performance

To keep up with the explosion in transactions that need to be processed by most companies, enterprises of all sizes are installing faster processors and increasing the utilisation of their servers through the use of server virtualisation technologies. This trend is increasing the need for much higher I/O performance in storage systems to keep up with and complement the servers increased throughput.

With more than 7,300 intelligent virtual storage controllers shipped, Hitachi is continuing to set the pace in the industry for enterprise storage performance. Hitachi unveiled today that the flagship Universal Storage Platform V, delivers more than 4 million IOPS of maximum performance-an advantage of up to 440 percent over other enterprise storage systems in the market and more than 60 percent faster performance of the original, category-defining Universal Storage Platform.  Powered by the vastly scalable Hitachi Universal Star Network V, the USP V enables customers to consistently overachieve on their service level agreement (SLA) requirements.

Improved storage economics with support for 750 GB SATA II drives

Rapid information growth from regulatory demands for data archiving and new applications put a strain on organisations IT budgets and expose inefficiencies in traditional storage architectures.  A tiered storage architecture can dramatically lower capital and operating expenses by matching the service-level needs of business applications to storage system attributes.

Today, Hitachi is delivering customers a new option for their tiered storage architectures with native support for 750 GB SATA II hard disk drives.  The lower cost, high capacity design of these disk drives deliver an improved gigabyte to kilowatt (GB/KW) ratio for IT operations which decreases power and cooling costs and contributes to a greener data centre. In addition, by matching the service-level needs of the application to the characteristics of the storage infrastructure, Hitachi customers can make the most effective use of available resources, ensuring all allocations are optimally placed. For example, customers can make snapshots of tier 1 data and move it to cost-efficient SATA disk for backup or development tests.

About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation provides Services Oriented Storage Solutions that enable heterogeneous storage to be dynamically provisioned according to business needs and centrally managed via industry-leading Hitachi storage virtualisation software. As an integral part of the Hitachi Storage Solutions Group, Hitachi Data Systems delivers storage infrastructure platforms, storage management software, and storage consulting services through direct and indirect channels in over 170 countries and regions. Its customers include nearly 60-percent of Fortune 100 companies.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 384,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2006 (ended March 31, 2007) consolidated revenues totalled 10,247 billion yen ($86.8 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services.