Hitachi Offers New SAN Suite

Electronic News, May 3, 1999

Santa Clara, Calif.-Hitachi Data Systems last week announced a new suite of services aimed at helping clients manage Storage Area Network- based environments.

The HDS Technical Services Group will offer several modular services to provide support and expertise at each stage of SAN design, development and implementation, the company said. The modularity of these services provides flexibility to allow the integration of new packaged SAN solutions and allows customers to evade entrapment caused by proprietary offerings, the company noted.

The SAN products are intended to address a broad spectrum of client business and technology environments and feature a number of services, including SAN Enterprise Infrastructure Assessment (EIA) Service; SAN Configuration Management Service; SAN System Design Service; SAN Project Management Service; SAN Installation Service; and SAN Business Continuance Service.

SAN EIA is a program designed essentially to systematically uncover an organization's information technology health and business needs, HDS noted. It was called a key part of HDS' SAN implementation approach. The SAN EIA is performed prior to any other SAN service offering and is comprised of a structured client assessment program that enables HDS to suggest re-engineering methodologies to improve a client's information technology infrastructure.

SAN Configuration Management offers a suite of services to assist in the assessment, design, implementation and management of a SAN cabling and component infrastructure.

SAN System Design utilizes information from the EIA phase to design a SAN Environment with two levels of systems design: strategic and tactical.

Last week Northern Trust Company, a personal financial services firm in Chicago, said that it had selected HDS to implement a SAN in its corporate data center.

"There are countless organizations in this industry that have jumped on the SAN bandwagon and made a lot of noise," said David Coombx, vice president and general manager, HDS Enterprise Storage. "Unfortunately, many of these organizations are using various tactics to gloss over the fact that they have little or nothing to show for it."

The SAN installation at Northern Trust will enable it to address three key objectives: storage consolidation, the offloading of data intensive traffic from the local area network, and remote mirroring.

International Data Corp., a Massachusetts-based market analysis firm, has predicted that the SAN market will grow to a size of $11.4 billion by 2002.

A relatively new approach to storage, a SAN creates a data storage structure that is independent of any single server, which improves service levels and manageability. A SAN uses the storage channels of multiple servers to link to common storage resources, including disk arrays and tape libraries. Such a system allows an enterprise to assign increments of storage to the servers that require the most storage, reducing the chance that resources will go unused.

The SAN, since it is independent of servers, has less chance of downtime for mission-critical applications resulting from changing servers.

Dell, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and IBM and EMC all offer SAN products.