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 and storage virtualization with front end storage administration and applications services virtualization. Over the next few months, we expect users will be very focused on exploring how the USPV platform can start to deliver benefit in their organizations.

We think they'll find several obvious answers. First, USPV and technologies like USPV will be able to claim as much as 20 - 40 percent of dead storage in many application domains. Secondly, that these technologies will dramatically improve the mechanisms that IT and storage administrators utilize to communicate needs, delivery and value to their business. And third, that these technologies will more fully integrate the way the marketplace is beginning to look at storage as driven by more consumer-oriented organizations. Namely, that storage is best perceived as a service tied to application requirements and not as hardware to be purchased, provisioned and allocated years in advance of its actual use.

Today, the USPV stack is going to add $1 or so per GB to the overall cost of storage, but as competition from EMC, IBM and other new startups begins to

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