Hitachi Unveils Thin Provisioning

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Building on the worldwide success of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and in line with Hitachi’s Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy, Hitachi today 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. With today’s announcement, 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.

Continuing the company’s track record of breakthrough innovations in enterprise storage, 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 Virtualization

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 utilization, 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. In general, Hitachi has eliminated some of the most pressing storage management headaches affecting data center managers today.

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 Hitachi’s 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 virtualized storage systems greener, lowering customers’ power and cooling consumption rates and increasing the utilization 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 Data Systems (HDS)