Hitachi Data Systems has announced the Storage Capacity Reclamation Guarantee program. The program offers customers the ability to reduce their storage capacity by 50 percent or more by using Hitachi virtualization technologies.

The company claims that this will lower customers' operational costs through simpler storage management, more efficient use of resources,  avoided purchase of unnecessary frames and drives.

"While the economic forecast for 2010 is optimistic, we do not expect to see the drive to reduce costs to subside," said Asim Zaheer, vice president of Corporate and Product Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. "We are more committed than ever to helping our customers consolidate costs, both operational and capital, while still improving data center performance."

The company claims reduced operational and capital costs with a money back guarantee in its Storage Capacity Reclamation Guarantee Program. It helps companies to leveraging current investments, increasing return on assets (ROA) and lowering operational costs.

Hitachi Data Systems hardware, software and services for storage reclamation, dynamic provisioning and virtualization have a combined economic impact by increasing the life of existing assets.

The 50 percent guarantee is for the raw storage capacity for migrating from third party RAID-1 source environments to dynamically provisioned RAID-5 target environments. For any third party RAID-5 environment, Hitachi Data Systems will guarantee a 20 percent storage capacity reduction only.

If the guaranteed storage capacity reduction is not achieved, Hitachi Data Systems will rebate money to the customer for the difference between the storage reduction guaranteed and the storage used.

Hitachi Data Systems products and services included in the Storage Capacity Reclamation Guarantee Program include- Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V or VM, Disk capacity equivalent to the guaranteed amount, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software, Hitachi Storage Reclamation Service.