* Unisys Metered Storage
Unisys joined the pay-for-use storage crowd last week with two offerings – one a metered storage program and a managed storage offering.
The company, known best for its mainframe technology, is partnering with EMC (whose storage hardware it sells) to offer customers a means to pay for storage capacity as it is used rather than all at once.
Unisys’ Metered Storage is for customers who want to manage their own storage; the Managed Utility Storage is for customers who want to outsource their storage needs.
Customers who use Metered Storage pay for it in GB/month (GBM). A customer will purchase as many GBMs as they think necessary. Unisys will provide usage data monthly so customers can adjust their required storage capacity.
The pay-for-use model has played well for the company. Unisys claims that most of its ClearPath mainframe customers pay for computing power based on MIPS (millions of instructions per second), so paying for storage capacity in the same way is not foreign to them.
The Unisys Metered Storage offering is managed by EMC StorageScope software, a storage resource management monitoring and reporting application that allows chargeback for storage consumption.
The managed utility storage provides customers with storage hardware, software and maintenance on a pay-as-needed basis. It comes bundled with 24/7 storage management services.
Correction: A previous newsletter said that EMC Migration Enabler eased migration in VMware environments. Dumb me – Migration Enabler works to ease migration in EMC Invista storage virtualization.
