The Santa Clara company is building the new services upon its flagship storage system -- the Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 series.
IT managers can rent, lease or purchase the Hitachi hardware and software, which handle both storage needed immediately as well as storage expected to be used in 90 to 100 days. Hitachi officials will conduct capacity reports and performance monitoring remotely, and customers can allocate more storage on the fly without any downtime.
"We will not have any knowledge of what [information] is stored. We will only know how it is being used," said David Broom, Hitachi's director of the storage utility program. "In this way, we are trying to separate managing the application from managing the storage."
Costs will vary, depending on customers' business needs and whether they lease, rent or purchase the hardware and software. But a premium of about 1 to 5 cents per MB per month will be charged. Hitachi officials said they are looking for customers who anticipate a 50 percent increase in storage per year.
This summer, Compaq introduced its Compaq Private Storage Utility Service. The Houston-based company uses its IT experts to manage storage remotely from one of Compaq's worldwide operations management centers. Pricing, which includes 576GB of storage and a three-year commitment, ranges from US$35 to $55 per gigabyte per month.
In September, IBM announced it would leverage the strength of its Global Services division to deliver hosted storage both internally and externally for businesses that would rather outsource the management and maintenance of their storage.
The company is using 3,000 of its storage consultants, as well as 175 worldwide data centers, to attract customers who want to rent storage on a "pay-as-needed" basis. Pricing ranges from $25 to $75 for a gigabyte of data per month.
