Hitachi has introduced new data migration services that places the needs of the business first.

Supporting Hitachi’s Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy, which leverages Hitachi’s market-leading virtualisation technology to deliver common storage services, the Hitachi Data Migration Services, enables enterprises to easily and transparently migrate data between heterogeneous storage systems while servers and applications stay online, the company said in a statement.

Hitachi Data Migration Services provide a synergistic fusion of consultative services, advanced data movement software and intelligent virtualization controllers to enable the most efficient data migration in the industry today with virtually no latency, no scalability limitations, and no excuses, it added.

According to IDC, 60-per cent of all data centers will relocate over the next five years, primarily for space, power and cooling reasons.

Costs related to moving data and making changes to storage infrastructures are substantial. Migration and provisioning complexities often require shutting down applications to move data or provision new storage capacity, often costing in excess of $50,000 for each migrated array, according to independent studies conducted by leading CIO consultancy ITCentrix.

”Business decision makers in the Gulf are paying more attention to managing their growth, not only for sustainability and profitability of their business, but in light of growing awareness of environmental responsibility. As a result, we will see many data centers replaced to more efficient ones. This replacement will require non-disruptive technologies like the Hitachi Data Migration Services. The heterogenous capabilities of this technology enables us to help organizations whether or not their storage is running on Hitachi systems,” said Tony Ward, general manager and sales director MENAT.

Hitachi has been helping a number of global businesses through this process. 

“Because we provide critical national, regional and local weather information and alerts to tens of millions of consumers on The Weather Channel, weather.com and mobile platforms, downtime is not an option,” said The Weather Channel CIO Brian Shield. “From planning to execution and support, Hitachi’s data migration services were flawless. With Hitachi, there was absolutely no data loss, the migration was much faster than we expected, and there was zero negative impact to our users. In short, Hitachi surpassed our high expectations.”

“Whether our customers are looking to migrate data for system upgrades, storage consolidation, or for development and testing purposes, through our unique approach, we are essentially removing the risks often associated with data migration. We have led the industry in storage virtualization for many years and we are using our proven experience in this arena to deliver transparent and rapid data movement between heterogeneous storage systems—making it easier for our customers to focus on what matters most, their business,” said Hicham Abdessamad, vice-president, Global Solution Services, Hitachi Data Systems.

“ESG has found that a large number of end users experience major problems when implementing data migrations including extended or unexpected downtime, data loss and application performance issues,” said Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Brian Babineau.

“Many users find migrating data to be a complex and time consuming process. Traditional data migrations can be costly, disruptive, and risky. Hitachi is aware of these challenges and is focusing its core competencies, best practices, technology and professional services on helping users to seamlessly and efficient migrate data within heterogeneous environments." – TradeArabia News Service