The skinny on Hitachi's thin provisioning

Moderator: Peter Burris Analyst: Dave Vellante

Over the last number of years, the storage community has waited expectedly for viable thin provisioning and related technologies to become generally available. The forces behind this anticipation are drawn from multiple locations including end users' growing expectations that the acquisition of storage should be as simple and transparent as using Google Gmail. Demands by CFO's to gain greater control over the rate of storage purchases and overall storage administrator desires to find better ways to manage multiple different forms of storage and storage resources. We've noted in the past that thin provisioning has become an umbrella term for describing the types of technologies that organizations will ultimately flock to as innovations become more available. This past week (5/14/2007) one of the 'big boys' Hitachi Data Systems, announced the Universal Storage Platform (USPV) which provides one of the first viable examples of how thin-provisioning technologies can be employed within organizations to change the way storage is administered, purchased and used.

While the USPV has, as any product does, certain constraints to deployment, for example only resources behind the USPV are available to be controlled by the USPV, we note that this is an example of a product that integrates both backend data storage virtualization with front end

To comment on this Professional Alert, please follow these simple instructions.

• Login before editing or commenting on this page.
• Comment on this article. You also can click the "+" tab above.
• Please sign your comments by typing "~~~" at the end of your comment.

Community Comments