Hitachi Intros Migration Services

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Addressing increasing customer demands for data migration solutions that do not suffer from severe scalability constraints or bring applications to a business-grinding halt, Hitachi today introduced new data migration services that places the needs of the business first. Supporting Hitachis Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy which leverages Hitachi’s market-leading virtualization technology to deliver common storage services, the Hitachi Data Migration Services, enables enterprises to easily and transparently migrate data between heterogeneous storage systems while servers and applications stay online.

Hitachi Data Migration Services provide a synergistic fusion of consultative services, advanced data movement software and intelligent virtualization controllers to enable the most efficient data migration in the industry today with virtually no latency, no scalability limitations, and no excuses.

According to IDC, 60 percent of all data centers will relocate over the next five years, primarily for space, power and cooling reasons. Costs related to moving data and making changes to storage infrastructures are substantial. Migration and provisioning complexities often require shutting down applications to move data or provision new storage capacity, often costing in excess of $50,000 for each migrated array, according to independent studies conducted by leading CIO consultancy ITCentrix.

The Weather Channel, a 24-hour weather network seen in more than 96 million U.S. households, is one of the many companies that has benefited from Hitachi Data Migration Services. Already having more than 80 terabytes of Hitachi storage in an environment consisting of 500 Microsoft® Windows/Linux servers, the company was looking to migrate 20 terabytes of Tier 1 data from a Hitachi Lightning 9980 V to a Hitachi Universal Storage Platform. Hitachi was able to eliminate data loss, drastically limit downtime and speed the entire migration by using virtualization to non-disruptively migrate data between the two platforms.

“Because we provide critical national, regional and local weather information and alerts to tens of millions of consumers on The Weather Channel, weather.com and mobile platforms, downtime is not an option,” said Brian Shield, CIO, The Weather Channel. “From planning to execution and support, Hitachi’s data migration services were flawless. With Hitachi, there was absolutely no data loss, the migration was much faster than we expected, and there was zero negative impact to our users. In short, Hitachi surpassed our high expectations.”