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Published on September 10, 2007

Connecting IT with business has been the mantra of IT organisations for many years. However, the reality often finds the data centre mired in redundancies and the proliferation of legacy architectures and infrastructure. Progressive IT organisations have adopted a services-oriented approach to managing core IT functions. Services are increasingly defined in user's terminology and the IT infrastructure needed to support those services is mapped and managed to service level agreements (SLAs).

Leading IT organisations are focused on dynamically provisioning and re-provisioning the entirety of the infrastructure (networks, servers, and storage) using policy based engines to ensure that "Gold" level services always meet their SLAs. The ability to do this in a cost-effective manner is the trick. In the past, storage systems lagged behind servers and networks whose management tools have adapted to these needs, this needs to change, taking a services orientated approach to storage addresses this requirement.

Storage as a services apply service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts to storage to deliver a platform that can be readily reconfigured and optimised to changing business requirements; these solutions deliver a process-oriented service approach to storage rather than the piecemeal, task-oriented approach, which leads to needless redundancies, over-subscription of storage, management complexity, and compliance exposure.

To apply service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts to storage you need an infrastructure platform with the capability to deliver:

o Control unit virtualisation with enhanced storage services that enable heterogeneous storage systems to interact and work in concert to optimise storage performance, data protection, and system availability

o An integrated portfolio of storage management, business continuity, and data mobility services that enable organisations to leverage a single set of tools for all of their storage and data management challenges

Building on this platform the strategy must also include file and object services, enabling organisations to leverage a single platform for all their data storage requirements. Most importantly, these organisations would now be able to respond more quickly to business and technology change and:

o Reduce cost and increase efficiency by reducing the complexity of their infrastructure and automating the process of storage management

o Boost utilisation and reduce over-subscription of storage resources

o Cost-effectively address a growing array of structured and unstructured data types and applications

o Improve availability, reliability, and SLA consistency for midrange and small enterprise data applications

o Provide metrics and enable policies to measure and automate the use of storage services

While other vendors may offer individual pieces of the puzzle, Hitachi Data Systems offers an integrated strategy of block, file, and object services providing intelligent tiered storage, common management, data protection, archiving, and performance optimisation. In addition, the Hitachi Data Systems strategy is unique in several ways:

o Hitachi Data Systems' solutions can scale from very small to very large with a storage approach using a "single pane of glass" management strategy.

o The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and Network Storage Controller are the only storage platforms in the market that manage heterogeneous storage assets.

o The Hitachi virtualisation capability is based on an architecture that goes beyond volume pooling to provide a rich set of common storage services for application servers on the front side and heterogeneous storage systems on the back side. This enables storage services to be presented as a unified whole, across block, file, and object data.

Hitachi Data Systems has a singular focus on delivering storage solutions enabling organisations to closely align their storage infrastructure with their business requirements.

By delivering on this promise, Hitachi Data Systems enables organisations to leverage a single universal Services Oriented Storage Solutions platform for delivering storage services and to take an efficient, process-oriented approach to storage, rather than the current, piecemeal, task-oriented approach that leads to needless redundancies, over-subscription of storage resources, management inefficiencies, and compliance exposures.