Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is a leader in mid-range and high-end, mission-critical storage system solutions. The HDS product family includes the Lightning 9980V, one of the highest performing, featurerich enterprise storage systems on the market today. A large number of Fortune 1000 companies are using the Lightning 9980V to support their strategic core business applications and back-office operations.

The Lightning 9980V combines a high-performance, scalable, redundant architecture with intelligent storage and data management software, backed up by a field-proven track record with years of experience in a wide variety of environments and applications.

The Need for Storage Consolidation

Storage consolidation is the process of taking multiple storage systems and reducing them to a fewer number. For example, ESG Lab spoke to one HDS customer that went from 18 storage systems to eight. The customer reduced overall infrastructure costs and, more importantly, simplified data storage management, without compromising service levels.

The benefits of storage consolidation include:

• Lower infrastructure and operational costs
• Fewer systems to manage (storage, switches, directors, etc.)
• Improve storage administrators’ productivity
• Greater storage capacity utilization
• Fewer software licenses for data management functions (mirroring, remote mirroring, etc.)
• Lower software/hardware maintenance costs
• Lower environmental costs (electricity, cooling, floor space, etc.)