2020 has proven to be a year full of challenges and innovation for infrastructure teams in small, medium, and enterprise organizations. While reacting to changes in behavior due to the pandemic, infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders have innovated faster than ever. They’ve done this while making critical investments, but also reducing total spending and maintaining infrastructure in place. “Keeping the lights on” in data centers while finding ways to reduce costs is top of mind. For I&O leaders utilizing Hitachi Virtual Storage Platforms (VSP), there is an excellent opportunity to cut ongoing support and storage maintenance costs without compromising service quality and uptime.
The Hitachi VSP G1000 and G1500 are high-capacity, high-performance enterprise storage systems that offer scalability and flexible connectivity. While servicing or upgrading components for these storage systems, you are also able to avoid disruption. Due to recent announcements by the manufacturer (see below), the Hitachi VSP G Series are great candidates for third-party Hitachi storage maintenance.
Phase Out of Hitachi VSP G1000 and G1500 Storage Systems
Hitachi announced the G1000 to go End of Service Life (EoSL) on June 30, 2022. They also recently withdrew the Hitachi VSP G1500 from sales and declared an EoSL date of September 30, 2025, in their product life cycle matrix. These Hitachi EOSL announcements make it a perfect time to consider moving these storage systems to a third-party storage maintenance provider such as Curvature.
Savings You Can Redeploy
According to Gartner, typically moving to third-party maintenance provide savings of 50-70% versus support prices from the manufacturer. Don’t wait until EoSL for Hitachi VSP G1000 and G1500 storage systems to take advantage of these savings and plan now to extend their lifecycle. By moving to third-party maintenance before EoSL, you can redeploy savings for several years. Avoid the pressure from the OEM to purchase new equipment. Additionally, you won’t have to look for third-party storage maintenance at the last minute when support from the OEM becomes unavailable.
Improved Customer Support and Response
When moving to a third-party storage maintenance provider, consider improvements to customer support for your Hitachi VSP G1000 and G1500 storage systems. Often OEMs will process support calls through slow, scripted phone calls that take forever to get the response you need. Look for a vendor-agnostic provider who isn’t looking to shift blame away from their product and wants to help you get to resolution quickly. A TPM should provide a call response within 30 minutes of an incident initiation and provide a proactive alert solution, such as Remote Enterprise Monitoring (REM) to further expedite a response and maximize uptime. They’ll respond rapidly and engage the right support team to resolve your specific need. Field engineers, who receive hands-on technical training in our labs, can be onsite to help you in two hours to resolve the issue when needed anywhere in the world. Curvature has a well-documented and strictly managed policy for support solutions through the COVID-19 pandemic and each engineer is equipped with PPE and risk mitigation to ensure we are only bringing solutions to your environment.
Get a Support Model You Need with Flexibility
Every organization is different and has different priorities causing a need for flexible service levels across a business. With third-party maintenance, you can customize service levels based on your requirements. You can provide heightened support and care where it’s needed most. With locations across the world, Curvature can provide this flexibility. Additionally, they can store spare parts locally, so they are accessible whenever required.
Partnership Beyond Maintenance
Providing maintenance for your Hitachi VSP G1000 and G1500 will help you extend the lifecycle of your storage systems, reduce your costs, and provide a better support experience. Curvature believes there needs to be a comprehensive way to optimize all existing digital infrastructure throughout its lifecycle to help fund innovation. We partner with our customers to do this. Curvature provides additional end-to-end IT Asset Lifecycle Optimization through Digitally Integrated Infrastructure Services (D²S). These more digitally integrated services can help you maximize uptime while proactively optimizing and finding additional cost savings opportunities to re-invest as the business changes.
We’d love to talk to you about moving your Hitachi VSP G1000 and G1500 over to a storage maintenance program or even discuss how our D²S program could provide ongoing optimization of your digital infrastructure. Contact us today to learn more!
We are delighted to announce that Curvature is joining Park Place Technologies. Read more.
