Hitachi recently announced the roll out of Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V series, which is expected to address industry issues such as infrastructure complexity, proliferation of disparate storage arrays and corporate edicts to reduce carbon output worldwide. Manish Balooja, technical director, Hitachi Data Systems India speaks to Biztech2 about Hitachi’s role in addressing the various storage issues and how a CIO/CTO, IT Head can handle these issues smartly with the right approach.

How is Hitachi helping enterprises with storage virtualisation?

ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) defines “storage virtualisation” as a technology that provides logical view and control of physical storage assets for greater utilisation, optimisation and simplification. External storage virtualisation as a storage service and technology is extremely valuable.

Hitachi has been successfully leveraging its external storage virtualisation capabilities within the USP, with several thousand products implementations worldwide.  End-user customers really are using it to create an intelligent tiered storage environment that consists of various external storage systems, including those from competitive third party vendors. 

How can enterprises streamline storage issues to get a higher ROI?

Enterprises across Asia Pacific are struggling to manage data growth and storage costs. To save money and time, many enterprises respond to growing data by simply investing in more storage capacity. This may fix problems in the short-term, but result in an expensive and inefficient way to manage storage environment in the long run.  

A more cost efficient, long-term approach would be for enterprises to classify their data according to its business value and then introduce a simple, tiered storage infrastructure. This will ensure that the most important business applications achieve optimal performance because they are supported by the best storage platform. 

Rather than being viewed as a risky and time-consuming task that is more appropriate for large businesses, enterprises should see storage management as a strategic exercise that will better align IT with the business and will result in significant cost efficiencies and yield a higher return on investment.

What are the top business issues on storage management that a CIO has to focus on?

The ‘Green’ Issue is a top business concern as:

Energy costs are rising and many countries are now facing the likelihood of energy surcharges. IT buyers are now starting to focus on operational power consumption (and by implication CO2 emissions) and are also becoming more environmentally aware. Gartner predicts a 50% rise in power demanded by high-availability data centres in the next five to eight years – growth is expected to boost project costs by 64%.

Companies are increasingly concerned with finding technology to improve utilisation and prolong the shelf-life of their IT equipment. Power disruptions are becoming commonplace – companies cannot be sure of a consistent supply. 

How does Hitachi's USP VM help handle SAN silos and storage migration?

The popularity and growth of storage networks combined with merger and acquisition activity has left many organisations with a sea of incompatible storage arrays. Many customers also struggle with a complex assortment of software license schemes from different vendors, expensive capacity-based tier one licensing policies, disruptive data migration procedures and a server infrastructure that is both underutilised and unable to get the required data easily. As a result, an organisation deploying storage area network (SAN) may have different standalone SAN islands that do not connect with each other.

The Universal Storage Platform VM joins the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V as the industry’s most complete enterprise-class platform developed explicitly to address these vital concerns.

Who are Hitachi’s target customers for the product? What are your expectations from the Indian market?

With the USP VM, we are targeting Fortune 1000 companies with distributed enterprise computing requirements and non-Fortune 1000 companies essentially small enterprises. It is an affordable entry-level enterprise storage services platform for organisations in India that would like to deploy virtualisation and dynamic provisioning to solve their storage problems.