Hitachi Data Systems has announced the industry's first Services Oriented Storage Solutions , long-awaited industry breakthroughs that enable storage to be provisioned and charged back according to business needs, not technology constraints. Based on the all-new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and a multitude of new Hitachi Storage Software innovations (see separate press releases), this announcement marks a new era in storage where the historical norm of locking in data, function, personnel and operations to rigid structures, and forcing users to pay for services that go unused, is replaced by the emergence of storage services that directly tie resources and functionality to business demands.
Hitachi 's Services Oriented Storage Solutions will dramatically alter the current stranglehold that storage architectures have on business flexibility by unleashing a services-oriented approach and specific functionality that enables business units and IT to tailor storage services to business needs and ensure that business units only pay for what is actually used.
Introducing Services Oriented Storage: Choice in the Hands of Business and IT
The information technology industry is full of examples where monolithic legacy applications are being modernized by constructing loosely coupled sets of services that can be invoked by applications as needed.
Hitachi , with the introduction of its new services architecture, brings this vision to storage. Services Oriented Storage Solutions applies service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts to storage to deliver a platform that offers sets of automated functions delivered as services to the business which can be invoked as needed. Companies now have the means to replace inefficient capacity-based chargeback models with models that apply more relevant metrics and better “monetize” all of the storage-based services they provide across the enterprise, delivering substantial breakthroughs in efficiency and business agility.
Beyond providing data migration, replication and storage aggregation, storage virtualization must enable common storage services so that dynamic business process requirements and their instantiated applications can use a common, managed heterogeneous storage infrastructure,” said Carl Greiner, senior vice president, Infrastructure and Software, OVUM. “The elimination of unique storage solutions and management to address each storage requirement will maximize leverage and lead to a truly optimized storage infrastructure. The realized benefit of storage virtualization will be the enablement of a common, consolidated, leveraged, dynamic, and managed portfolio of heterogeneous storage services.”
The newly announced Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V packages and delivers key storage services such as:
- Business continuity services
- Content management services (search, indexing via the Hitachi Content Archive Platform)
- Non-disruptive data migration
- Volume management across heterogeneous storage arrays
- Dynamic “Thin” Provisioning
- Storage security services (immutability, logging, auditing, data shredding)
- Data de-duplication (via the Hitachi Virtual Tape Library solution)
- I/O load balancing
- Data classification
- File management services
Hitachi Services Oriented Storage Solutions offer companies the ability to present business clients with a menu of storage attributes such as performance, availability, cost and security, and charge for those services based on the client's selection.
“The most interesting and compelling feature of Hitachi's strategy is that management metrics—quality of service (QoS), service level objective/agreement (SLO/SLA), and recovery point objective (RPO) are applied across all services layers,” said John Webster, principal IT advisor, Illuminata. “Seeing enterprise storage in the context of deliverable services is key to unlocking both the realizable and chargeable value of virtualized storage.”
“IT managers can use capabilities like those included in Hitachi 's Services Oriented Storage Solutions to change the interaction between IT departments and their business customers,” said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems, IDC. “IT managers can shift the emphasis of their discussions from infrastructure impediments to the business services required to support rapid application deployment, greater resiliency and ongoing cost-of-use.”
“IT must provide more transparency to the granularity of services being provided to the business and allow clients to see exactly what they're being charged for,” said Dave Vellante, president of leading CIO consultancy ITCentrix. “Leading organizations are beginning to construct pay-as-you-go models that reflect the consumption of storage-related services versus some vague concept of chargeback. Hitachi 's services-oriented approach supports the idea that IT delivery and business lines can forge true partnerships based on value.”
Today's announcement includes the all-new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, the industry's most powerful storage services platform which provides the horsepower for Hitachi 's Services Oriented Storage Solutions. By virtue of its powerful controller-based virtualization engine, Hitachi is in a unique position to package and deliver storage services across heterogeneous storage assets, whether file, object or block-based. Together with Hitachi 's robust software portfolio, these capabilities mark the beginning of a new era in storage service delivery.
Today's announcement also includes Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, available as an optional service for Hitachi 's Universal Storage Platform V. This powerful “thin” provisioning software eliminates guesswork and waste by taking advantage of the Universal Storage Platform V's 247 petabyte address space. Dynamic Provisioning is an innovative example of how Hitachi is delivering Services Oriented Storage Solutions and reshaping storage delivery. Historically, organizations have been required to estimate how much storage needs to be allocated for an application and pay for that storage in advance of actually needing it. If the forecast is too high, storage goes unused as a depreciating asset. If too low, applications run out of space and crash, causing lost revenue and productivity. Dynamic Provisioning and the power of the Universal Storage Platform V completely eliminate these unproductive choices.
“Storage services delivered to the business today are not only costly, but inflexible, giving buyers little choice and limited visibility about use and value,” said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The Universal Storage Platform V provides a highly scalable platform with a suite of functionality that is actually designed to enable better storage services delivery. In order for IT to provide a true service back to the business we need to create utility. In order to create utility we need to better leverage physical IT infrastructure. The Universal Storage Platform V does this, providing unique and compelling value to enable Services Oriented Storage Solutions.”
Hitachi's Architectural Superiority
With the introduction of the Universal Storage Platform V, new Hitachi Storage Software and Services Oriented Storage Solutions, Hitachi is redefining storage architecture by emphasizing responsiveness to business needs, as well as IT configuration and deployment requirements. A prerequisite of delivering a storage services architecture is to allow organizations to take multiple views of their storage infrastructure. An application view allows the storage consumer to see what storage is being used, which services are enabled to meet business requirements and how much storage costs. The storage management view provides IT with an aggregate picture of storage and services demands, allowing administrators to utilize available resources in the optimal way and minimize the cost of providing storage to the business.
Hitachi has developed the most advanced and sensible storage services architecture on the market by understanding that different constituents need to view storage in different ways. Specifically, Hitachi 's virtualization technology, powerful software that enables the separation of logical views from physical assets, is a key underpinning of the Services Oriented Storage Solutions architecture. Hitachi's superior controller technology provides virtualization, a 247 petabyte address space, logical partitioning, virtual connections, support for heterogeneous storage and the sheer performance needed to truly deliver storage services on-demand—while at the same time eliminating vendor lock-in.
What this means for customers is:
• Management simplicity achieved through the use of common storage services throughout an entire heterogeneous storage infrastructure
• A superior business model allowing organizations to develop chargebacks for services based on consumption of required function rather than a vague allocation scheme
• A radically more efficient IT environment that goes beyond consolidation into dynamically allocated tiered storage
• Improved utilization of physical assets with business-enabling capabilities such as Hitachi 's Universal Volume Manager, Dynamic Provisioning, Virtual Partition Manager and Virtual Ports
• Previously unheard of asset value protection by supporting the virtualization of heterogeneous storage arrays from leading vendors
Moreover, Hitachi 's Services Oriented Storage Solutions provide unmatched scalability by encompassing very small to very large storage based on an application's business needs. Utilizing the external virtualization services of the Universal Storage Platform, customers can incorporate midrange Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) and Workgroup Modular Storage (WMS) systems, integrated under the same storage management umbrella, benefiting from the same common storage services. The AMS and WMS systems complement the Universal Storage Platform as tiered or archive storage, especially when configured with SATA disk for lower costs. This is yet another example of Hitachi delivering unmatched cost-effectiveness and scalability to customers. |
