HDS Offers Cheap Virtual Storage Migration, Promises No Downtime

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has introduced a cloud storage migration system that eliminates host and application downtime.

The non-disruptive migration service claims to reduce effort by 90 percent when migrating from previous generation of Hitachi enterprise storage (USP, NSC 55, USP V, USP VM) to Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). HDS says the service is first-of-a-kind, allowing organisations to reduce risk, eliminate business disruption and manage the migration process across multivendor storage systems more efficiently.

The migrant song

According to a survey on migrating to new technologies by TechValidate, an independent market research firm, 70 percent of businesses reported schedule overruns and 64 percent reported budget overruns.

With overall storage migration costs exceeding $15,000 (£9,500) per terabyte (more than the purchase cost of the capacity, according to David Merrill, chief economist at HDS), organisations are under increasing pressure to identify and adopt best practices to reduce risk and expenditures.

“In today’s business climate, organisations need to accelerate innovation and reduce operational expenses to increase their competitiveness,” said Hu Yoshida, vice president and CTO of HDS. “Only HDS provides the migration capabilities to eliminate downtime while dramatically reducing the risks and costs associated with adopting new technologies. The key to achieving this capability is that virtualisation, specifically our proven Hitachi controller-based storage virtualisation, is at the core of our new service and gives us distinct advantages in efficiency and cost effectiveness.”

Hitachi VSP could help organisations build massive scalability with virtualised server environments and pave the way for cloud deployments, the com0any claimed. The core technology of nondisruptive migration is a new feature of Hitachi VSP, built on the foundation of near-instantaneous failover and recovery capabilities of Hitachi clustering.

Other features of Hitachi VSP include support for parallel migration of up to eight source systems to a single Hitachi VSP, reduced staging effort with automated configuration transfer, and host transparent migration with no performance impact.

The service eliminates host path management dependencies through its support of native multipath I/O (a fault-tolerance and performance enhancement technique) and third-party multipathing products that support industry standard failover.

Best of all, it is really quick, said HDS – Hitachi Global Services migration consultants employ nondisruptive migration to conduct technology refreshes to Hitachi VSP in a “matter of days”.

“After testing and validating the nondisruptive migration for Hitachi VSP, we believe the service is superior to other migration services, in that we will be able to execute a technology refresh to Hitachi VSP in days and eliminate host and application downtime,” said Tom Frana, president and CEO of ViON, which delivers hardware and software services to American federal agencies including the US Department of Defense.