Exchange administrators face an almost constant problem of trying to rebalance users among storage groups and prevent an unbalanced environment.

• Hitachi Universal Storage Platform™ V and Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software allow the creation of virtual volumes. These can be created with the RAID level and number of disks needed to support required performance levels (IOPS). This feature allows customers to tailor dynamic volumes to meet the physical and performance needs of specific applications.
• The ability to create large and/or performance volumes greatly reduces the amount of complicated host-based storage management efforts.
• Hitachi Dynamic provisioning software can essentially eliminate administration tasks formerly associated with volume management.

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software also simplifies performance optimization by transparently spreading many hosts' individual I/O workloads across many physical disks (wide striping), thereby reducing performance management concerns and optimizing performance and throughput. Dynamic Provisioning software is available on both the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and Universal Storage Platform VM.

• The Universal Storage Platform V can be included in Exchange 2007 architecture discussions as a method of simplifying the storage configuration and controlling total solution costs; while adding the performance benefits of I/O speed, more RAID options and much faster backups.

More info about Hitachi Data Systems USPV products at: http://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/universal-storage-platform-v.html