Hitachi Adds New Efficiency Features to Its Storage Software

Data storage now is all about efficiency: getting the most out of existing systems by using all available capacity and avoiding storage bloat that can be both costly and ineffective.

Hitachi Data Systems, which has been quiet on the new-products front lately, on June 17 introduced some new features for its Universal Storage Platform and Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 product lines that aim to recapture unutilized storage capacity and help IT managers increase the return on their storage assets.

As a new feature that now comes with the latest version of its Dynamic Provisioning software, HDS unveiled what it calls Zero Page Reclaim, which continually examines volumes of physical capacity, returns unused storage blocks to the storage pool and reclaims storage space.

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All too often, valuable storage capacity gets gobbled up by storage bloat, which is inaccessible space bottled up due to inflexible provisioning—either by automation or by human action. A number of storage providers are finding new ways to break through these sometimes hard-to-find bubbles and allow this capacity to be added to the virtual pool.

Hitachi's DP software runs on its own storage arrays, but it also works with other vendors' hardware, Hitachi Senior Product Marketing Manager John Harker told eWEEK.

"Hitachi is enabling users to virtualize and manage all the storage capacity in a multivendor SAN [storage area network]," Harker said. "The software also offers replication, thin provisioning and disaster recovery on third-party arrays."

Hitachi also is adding two other features: Automatic Dynamic Rebalancing and a new Storage Reclamation Service.

"When new physical volumes are added to expand a virtual pool of storage, existing virtual volumes in the pool are automatically restriped across these new physical volumes to rebalance the workload," Harker said in describing the dynamic rebalancing feature. "HDS is the only enterprise-class storage vendor that automatically rebalances the pages of a virtual volume so they are actively restriped to take advantage of new disks when the pool is expanded."

The Storage Reclamation Service assesses the customer's total storage environment, plans the new dynamic provisioning, migrates the data and reclaims unused capacity with Zero Page Reclaim without disruption to the application, Harker said.

According to Hitachi, the new storage features are now available.
 
"With the Storage Reclamation Service, Hitachi Data Systems is creating a services package built on a strong technology portfolio of storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning, affording customers the opportunity to reduce capital and operational expenses more quickly and with less risk," said Brad Nisbet, program manager of IDC Storage Services research.

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