Storage player Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) claims something of a market first with what it says is the first onsite, fully-managed, pay-per-use storage system for businesses – a kind of private cloud that the customer doesn’t need to take any real ownership of at all, unlike most instances of that form of remote provisioning, which is really down to the user to set up and run.
Its so-say Hitachi Cloud Service for Private File Tiering is thus claimed to be the first service that automatically adjusts utilisation and billing based on a business’s (or their end-users’) consumption, while allowing the capability to support data held locally at a business’s location with full management off-premises.
The economics – if they work – sound pretty useful, too. The claim is there is no mandatory hardware or technology purchase/lease as the service is billed purely based on consumption. A target of no less than a 25% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) is being touted while customers are being promised no less than "100% utilisation" by only paying for the storage they use.
Hitachi has also developed a public online cloud solution with Digi-Data Corporation, a leading software-as-a-service provider, which will also enable businesses to offer pay-per-use storage for their end customers.
"This is purely about taking away customer capex and letting them only work about opex," Lynn Collier, director of core software products and solutions EMEA for HDS, told us.
It has to be noted that this solution – the first in a series – is directed at the NAS (network attached storage) universe. The market HDS is after is all that unstructured data in file shares or home directories, e.g. business documents, file data, PACS records, video surveillance and Web content, often stored in multiple independent file servers or NAS appliances that are costly to manage.
A large portion of the data sitting on expensive primary NAS devices consumes significant capacity that requires constant backup, which in turn takes up even more capacity in the storage network. To help manage the explosive growth of unstructured data, Hitachi Data Systems will deliver a fully managed Hitachi Cloud Services suite and cloud-enabled infrastructure that can be located within your own environment.
Low risk cloud and Storage-as-a-Service solutions like this will surely become more and more common. But HDS have to be given the kudos for assembling such a well-thought out package aimed at, as it says, helping its customers safely tap storage resources in the cloud "at their own pace".
It will enable enterprise customers to move legacy or lower value file data into a cloud storage environment and pay only for what they consume, when they consume it and builds on the extensive storage investments IT organisations have in place today as customers don’t pay up front for storage and can use additional storage when needed.
All firms will like the idea, surely, that they are thus being given the agility to grow and shrink capacity to meet the real-world/fluctuating demands of their business.
So the cloud is all hype, right? Sure – and as Gartner often warns, that’s a fine attitude… so long as holding it doesn’t mean you end up being the best buggywhip manufacturer for that big horse and carriage market you see all round you.
