HDS Introduces Nondisruptive Migration Service

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation introduced a nondisruptive migration service capability that migrates from Hitachi enterprise storage to Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).

The storage migration solution eliminates host and application downtime. Nondisruptive migration allows organizations to reduce risk, eliminate 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 Hitachi migration methodologies, nondisruptive migration 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 agencies such 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 performance, capacity and open, multivendor storage virtualization for large businesses and enterprises, VSP helps organizations build scalability with virtualized server environments and pave the way for cloud deployments. The core technology of nondisruptive migration is a new feature of VSP, built on the foundation of near-instantaneous failover and recovery capabilities of Hitachi clustering.

For organizations seeking a return on their enterprise IT assets, Hitachi Global Services migration consultants leverage nondisruptive migration to conduct technology refreshes to 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
• Eliminates 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 VSP

Hitachi Global Services:
Methodologies for Lowering Migration Cost and Risk
Migration Services from HDS offer organizations the approaches to data migration, ensuring minimum downtime, business continuity. With thousands of local and remote data migrations and experienced migration consultants, migration methodology comprises multiple migration techniques for heterogeneous storage environments. The Global Services portfolio offers a 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.

To read what Hu Yoshida says about Hitachi nondisruptive migration service capability