Hitachi Data Systems has recently introduced its new software and service enhancements that would enable customers to reclaim underutilized storage capacity and increase the return on their assets. Coupled with the company’s recently announced Switch IT On program, the enhancements can help customers improve the efficiency of their existing environments by reclaiming storage capacity across all storage tiers.

With these offerings the company claims to have customers realizing up to 200 TB in reclaimed storage capacity and CAPEX savings upwards of $2M, thereby deferring future storage purchases.

 “Storage economics, our best practices for helping companies assess their storage requirements and investment returns through true ownership cost, has never been more critical to enterprises and thin provisioning can play an integral role in saving organizations money while improving operational efficiency,” said Hu Yoshida, Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Data Systems. “Today’s software and services announcement is part of our focus to help our customers do more with less. Dynamic provisioning simplifies operations by replacing the management of hundreds of volumes with the management of one or two pools of virtual capacity. Dynamic provisioning can also reclaim capacity on existing open systems volumes without disruption for significant cost savings that go straight to customers’ bottom line.”

The newly introduced capabilities include, Zero Page Reclaim which can examine volumes of physical capacity on or on storage connected to the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform, return unused storage blocks back to the storage pool and reclaim storage space and enterprise-class Automatic Dynamic Rebalancing wherein when physical volumes are added to expand a dynamic provisioning pool of storage, existing virtual volumes in the pool are automatically re-striped across these new physical volumes to rebalance the workload.

It also includes support for the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family and Storage Reclamation Service which can assess the customer’s environment, plan the new dynamic provisioned environment and migrate the data and reclaims unused capacity with Zero Page Reclaim without disruption to the application, thereby deferring CAPEX and increasing ROA.