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Hitachi Data Systems Eliminates Downtime and Lowers Cost of Virtual Storage Migration

February 13, 2012


New Nondisruptive Migration Service Enables Simplified Management and Reduces Effort by 90% when Migrating to Hitachi VSP

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — February 13, 2012 — Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT/ TSE: 6501), today introduced a nondisruptive migration service capability that migrates from Hitachi enterprise storage to Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and is the industry’s first storage migration solution that eliminates host and application downtime. Nondisruptive migration by Hitachi allows organizations to significantly reduce risk, business disruption, and more efficiently manage migration processes across multivendor storage systems, resulting in 90 percent less effort compared to industry averages.

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 US$15,000 per terabyte, organizations are under increasing pressure to identify and adopt best practices to lower their IT operating expenses and redirect savings in support of new investments. Leveraging proven Hitachi migration methodologies, nondisruptive migration uniquely enables host-transparent storage migration that allows IT organizations to mitigate the outage window due to data migrations and reduce risk and expenditures.

“In today’s business climate, organizations need to accelerate innovation and reduce operational expenses to increase their competitiveness,” said Hu Yoshida, vice president and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. “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 virtualization, specifically our proven Hitachi controller-based storage virtualization, is at the core of our new service and gives us distinct advantages in efficiency and cost effectiveness. By leveraging our new nondisruptive migration service capabilities, organizations can more efficiently manage migration processes to meet business requirements through a comprehensive methodology that addresses the people, process and technology involved in the transition.”

“ViON delivers hardware and software as on-demand, capacity services to federal agenciessuch as the U.S. Department of Defense, and at the core of our private cloud offering is Hitachi controller-based storage virtualization,” said Tom Frana, president and CEO, ViON Corporation.“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.The nondisruptive migration service by Hitachi addresses the requirements of our most demanding enterprise customers; no other virtualization technology vendors come close to Hitachi storage virtualization.”

Nondisruptive Migration by Hitachi

By offering best-in-class performance, capacity and open, multivendor storage virtualization for large businesses and enterprises, Hitachi VSP helps organizations build massive scalability with virtualized server environments and pave the way for cloud deployments. 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.

For organizations seeking a greater return on their enterprise IT assets, Hitachi Global Services migration consultants leverage nondisruptive migration to conduct technology refreshes to Hitachi VSP in a matter of days. It jumps ahead of other migration approaches:

  • Enables host transparent migration with no performance impact, ensuring minimum downtime and maximum business continuity
  • Helps eliminate host path management dependencies through its support of native multipath I/O and third party multipathing products that support standard industry failover
  • Supports host clustering configurations by synchronizing persistent group reserves on source volumes and keeping the host cluster operational
  • Reduces staging effort with automated configuration transfer, greatly lowering data migration risk and effort
  • Supports parallel migration of up to eight source systems to one Hitachi VSP

Hitachi Global Services: Proven Methodologies for Lowering Migration Cost and Risk

Migration Services from Hitachi Data Systems offer organizations the most cost-effective, risk-mitigating approaches to data migration, ensuring minimum downtime, maximum business continuity. With thousands of successful local and remote data migrations and experienced migration consultants, Hitachi Data Systems migration methodology is proven and comprises multiple migration techniques for heterogeneous storage environments. The Hitachi Data Systems Global Services portfolio offers a broad spectrum of offerings that includes assessment and consulting, planning and design, implementation, health checks, ongoing management and operations, and education and support services to help organizations meet defined goals.

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About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer ROI, unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. With a vision that IT must be virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. With more than 5,400 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Hitachi Data Systems products, services and solutions are trusted by the world’s leading enterprises, including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 and more than 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100. Hitachi Data Systems believes that data drives our world – and information is the new currency. To learn more, visit: http://www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2010 (ended March 31, 2011) consolidated revenues totaled 9,315 billion yen ($112.2 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

Press Contacts:

Hitachi Data Systems
Melissa Rossiter
(408) 970-4849
melissa.rossiter@hds.com

Lois Paul & Partners
Brandi Ellerbee
(512) 638-5327
brandi_ellerbee@lpp.com