HDS wagers money on performance

SINGAPORE--Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has unveiled a global service guarantee program that promises to reimburse customers if the targeted reduction in storage capacity is not realized.

Launched Friday, its "Storage Capacity Reclamation Guarantee Program" is a follow-up to the company's Storage Reclamation Service introduced in June 2009. Under the service, HDS conducts an assessment of the customer's environment, designs the storage environment, migrates the data and at the same time taps its own dynamic provisioning technology to return unused storage blocks back to the overall pool.

With the assurance scheme, HDS guarantees that customers will be able to lower their raw storage capacity by 50 percent or more, after migrating from competitive RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) 1 environments to RAID 5 environments offered by HDS. The company offers a 20 percent capacity guarantee for migration from rival RAID 5 environments.

If the storage reduction is not achieved, HDS will rebate the customer the difference in cost between the storage reduction guaranteed and the actual storage utilization.

Naresh Gaur, HDS' solutions business director for Southeast Asia, noted that going forward, businesses would continue to be prudent in their investments and focus on cost-cutting. As a result, HDS expects "good uptake" for the guarantee program in 2010, Gaur said in a media session here Friday.

With the program, HDS now joins rival NetApp in offering money-back guarantee in storage reclamation. Announced in September 2008, NetApp's guarantee program pledges that customers will use 50 percent less storage with NetApp's technology in their virtual environments, compared to traditional storage offerings. The storage vendor upped the ante in February 2009 by promising to decrease customers' third-party storage capacity for virtual server environments by 35 percent if they switched to a NetApp environment.