Just-In-Time Storage From Hitachi Data Systems

IT execs are getting used to seeing the need for storage exploding. "It's gonna grow 100%, let's go have a beer." But what has been frustrating them lately is how they are forced to buy enough capacity to cover the peaks only to watch the hardware idle during the slow times.

Seeing an opportunity, Hitachi Data Systems on Tuesday unveiled just-in-time storage services that will help storage administrators juggling rapid growth, unpredictable demand, and expensive management costs. Hitachi will establish a monthly service-level agreement that lets customers pay for storage as they grow. Hitachi's Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 series, which carries the just-in-time code, already works with Z-OS, Unix, and Windows NT/2000 servers. It's priced at 1 to 5 cents per megabyte of storage, depending on the services used.

Storage administrators will be able to click a mouse to increase storage capacity in small increments, while the system remains up and running. The same person can click a mouse a few more times and change the number of input/output paths or increase the capacity of semiconductor cache memory. Both tasks will speed up how fast information flows back to users who request the data. During slow times, administrators can reduce the I/O paths and decrease the cache.

Industry analyst Mike Kahn at the Clipper Group says that many of the storage vendors are talking about storage on demand. But he says Hitachi is taking the idea further than anyone else has so far. Hitachi, Kahn says, is providing "management by increment."