Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

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1 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering This e-book demonstrates the benefits of Hitachi storage virtualization and Dynamic Tiering through customer experiences. Optimizing data storage in today s IT environment is complex and dynamic, and is driving the need for virtualization and automation. Each application contends for the fastest storage. Business value of data is constantly changing. Storage provisioning decisions are based on inaccurate assumptions and outdated information. Sub-optimal optimization using either manual or ongoing labor intensive development processes.

2 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering Dynamic Tiering Delivers Automation Because it is not cost-effective to keep most data on Tier-1 storage, a tiered storage architecture is much more costefficient than a single-tier architecture. Establishing storage tiers enables your organization to assign data to different types of storage media based on a number of factors that primarily involve performance, access rates and costs. Business-critical data and applications should be kept on your highest tier, while rarely accessed, stale data is stored on your lowest-cost storage tier. As the amount of data being stored continues to soar, the key to efficient use of tiered storage and getting control of growing storage operations costs is automation. 1 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

3 2 Simplify Administration with Dynamic Tiering To simplify storage administration, Hitachi Dynamic Tiering software automatically optimizes data placement. Dynamic Tiering gives top-tier performance to information sets stored primarily on less-expensive tiers. Hitachi Data Systems 2

4 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Improve Performance with Dynamic Tiering Typically, over 80% of data-access activities involve less than 20% of storage. Hitachi Dynamic Tiering leverages this pattern to improve performance. This performance improvement is accomplished through wide striping and fine-grain tiering. Wide striping uses small portions of a large number of drives for virtualized volumes. Dynamic Tiering uses fine-grain tiering within the wide-striped volume to move active data to the highest tier. And it fully utilizes your highest-performance tiers while unused capacity is shifted to cheaper, lower-tier drives. The system is automatically continuously self-optimizing, boosting performance and improving capacity utilization. 3 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

5 4 Optimize with Dynamic Tiering With Hitachi Dynamic Tiering solutions, the days of manually assigning specific data to storage tiers is over. Now, data is dynamically moved up and down between tiers based on current access levels and performance requirements, also called the I/O heat index. This data movement is done automatically by the system based on simple parameters established during the setup process. Hitachi Data Systems 4

6 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Virtualize Heterogenous Storage Hitachi extends the benefits of Dynamic Tiering to virtualized storage. Advanced Hitachi storage controller technology provides a virtualized tiered storage architecture to unify connected external storage. The technology provides thin provisioning, advanced replication, logical partitioning, virtual connections, support for heterogeneous storage, and the sheer performance and scalability needed to truly deliver storage services on demand. At the same time, it eliminates vendor lock-in for lower tiers of storage. Tiered storage environments can be scaled using hardware appropriate to the tier and available from a variety of vendors, providing flexibility and choice while dramatically simplifying storage provisioning and management. Extending the benefits of Dynamic Tiering to virtualized storage, Hitachi virtualized tiered storage architecture leverages superior Hitachi controller technology to unify heterogeneous storage. The architecture provides thin provisioning, advanced replication, logical partitioning, virtual connections, support for heterogeneous storage, and the sheer performance and scalability needed to truly deliver storage services on demand. At the same time, it eliminates vendor lock-in. Tiered storage can be scaled out using hardware appropriate to the tier, dramatically simplifying storage provisioning and management. 5 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

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8 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Reduce Storage Complexity with Dynamic Tiering With Hitachi Dynamic Tiering, the traditional complexities and administrative overhead of implementing data lifecycle management and storage tiering are solved. Dynamic Tiering software simplifies storage administration by eliminating the need for time-consuming manual data classification and movement of data to optimize usage of tiered storage. 7 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

9 8 Leverage SSD with Dynamic Tiering Typically, over 80% of data-access Hitachi Dynamic Tiering takes the guesswork out of deploying high-cost flash storage as a data accelerator. Because HDT moves only the most active data to the highest tier, flash storage usage is automatically optimized. Even a small percentage improvement can dramatically improve overall performance. Also, flash technology requires less power than disks and enables extremely space-efficient configurations. When combined with a higher percentage of energy-efficient high-capacity SAS drives, this technology can reduce drive count and improve overall system power consumption. Hitachi Data Systems 8

10 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Storage Virtualization Use Cases Single-vendor management tools and isolated pools of multiple vendors storage fragment the infrastructure, making it difficult to share resources, improve operational efficiency and migrate online data. The powerful virtualization capabilities of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform or Hitachi Unified Storage VM create unified pools of tiered storage. Virtualized tiered storage better aligns data on storage systems by allowing you to efficiently match storage attributes with the service level needs of individual business applications. 9 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

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12 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Capacity Utilization Savings One of the most pressing issues facing organizations today is the need to reduce storage costs. By implementing a virtualized tiered storage architecture, an IT organization can dramatically improve capacity utilization and lower capital and operational expenses. 11 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

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14 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Case Study: Global 500 Electronics Company Putting it all together, let s look at one customer s case study 13 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

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16 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES Cost Savings with Storage Virtualization In addition to benefiting from a number of agility and flexibility benefits, most customers saved from 20% to 50% on their storage with storage virtualization. Hitachi Data Systems focuses on providing our customers with superior storage and data management products and capabilities such as Dynamic Tiering and storage virtualization. If you would like more information about Hitachi Data Systems products, please contact your local Hitachi Data Systems sales representative or channel partner or click on one of the links below Quick Links Community Connect and share instantly, ask questions, find and follow experts. Contact Sales Connect with the sales team. Get More Information Receive expert advice and information about HDS products, solutions and services. Support Available 24 hours/day, seven days a week. Resource Library Find what you need, from datasheets, white papers, analysts reports and more. 15 Customer Experiences with Storage Virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering

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18 Corporate Headquarters 2845 Lafayette Street Santa Clara, CA USA Regional Contact Information Americas: or Europe, Middle East and Africa: +44 (0) or Asia Pacific: or Hitachi Data Systems Corporation All rights reserved. HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names are properties of their respective owners. Notice: This document is for informational purposes only, and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied, concerning any equipment or service offered or to be offered by Hitachi Data Systems Corporation.