In today's world of unprecedented growth of storage and storage demands, companies are faced with the rapidly increasing size and complexity of storage area networks (SANs). Yet, due to provisioning layouts for optimal application performance along with efforts to streamline storage administration tasks, most companies only utilize 30 to 50 percent of their usable storage resources. With little or no corresponding increases in IT staff, the burden on storage administrators is to manage an ever increasing amount of storage per person, making efforts to improve utilization even more difficult. What if there was a way to improve storage utilization, optimize performance and improve IT efficiencies at the same time?

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software is a dramatic step toward improving utilization and automation in SAN storage. As described in this case study, the virtualization capabilities of the new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ V with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software improve storage utilization to new levels. The automated capabilities to balance the load across many more of the physical resources of the system remove a significant burden of storage management and optimization from the IT storage administrator and deliver on a next generation promise of self-managing, self-optimizing SANs.