Storage Nation

This week we shared with our partners that Oracle and HDS will not renew the current distribution agreement for our Enterprise Storage platform that we had with Sun Microsystems prior to the Oracle acquisition. That agreement expires on March 31. We have enjoyed a very good relationship with Sun over the past nine years and have many joint customers whom we consider as our own. Oracle has ongoing capability to service their installations beyond the end of the Sun contract and we will continue to work with them to ensure that these customers receive the same high level service and support.

Late last night I got an email from  Christopher Kusek asking about FICON Encryption of data at rest. “Hey Hu, I was reading a post from 2008 whereby it was stated that there was a solution for data at rest encryption over FICON? http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2008/10/green_encryption_for_storage.html Can you provide a little insight into this, and whether this story is true and there infact is a FICON DAR encryption solution?” Thank you! Christopher I thought I would answer it in this blog since others may have a similar question.

February 14 marks the start of the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger. This year it happens to fall on Valantine’s Day.  Here is a greeting, wishing you all the best for this New Year From the Folks at Hitachi Data Systems

 Hitachi Data Systems was the first vendor to deliver a switch based storage  architecture over ten years ago. Recently we are starting to see storage vendors deliver storage systems that include a switch in their architecture. However, the new switch architectures are designed for loose coupling  of modular storage nodes while the Hitachi architecture is designed for tight coupling of storage resources. In 2000, Hitachi Data Systems introduced the Lightning 9900 storage subsystem with an internal switch that tightly coupled Front End (FE) and Back End (BE) port processors through a global cache. This enabled any to any connection between the FE storage ports and the BE disk controllers.

IT costs are increasing about 7 to 8 % per year. But when you look at industry spend on storage hardware that spend has been flat for many years, primarily due to Moore’s law. Storage densities continue to double about every 18 months

If you saw the comments by EMC’s Barry Burke to my last blog post, Barry give his explanation of how VMAX works.

EMC announced FAST version 1 this week and one of the more insightful articles was by Beth Pariseau of SearchStorage.com. I am fairly certain EMC briefed Beth on this announcement and that she had access to their references, so it’s safe to say her information is pretty accurate here are my thoughts on what I read in the PR and from Beth’s article:   Is EMC behind the competition? – Hitachi has had policy based file and LUN level tiering for some time

John Webster posted on the changing role of the IT Storage pro based on a conversation he had with the CIO of a large technology company. This CIO was speculating that the role of the storage administrator within IT operations is going away.  This CIO believes that the segregation of IT operational departments along technological boundaries, server, network, and storage, is disappearing due to virtualization and the convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet within the data center

This morning Hitachi Data Systems announced the addition of the Hitachi Data Replicator to our portfolio of replication and data protection software. This product is the result of a partnership with InMage Systems which was founded by our good friend Kumar Malavalli, founder and CTO for Brocade Communications and Rajeev Atluri from Gadoox

SearchStorage ANZ’s Simon Sharwood posted an article referencing a NetApp presentation which was posted on a public RSS feed that NetApp provides for its user community. According to Sharwood’s article, the presentation was dated 2008 and published October 28, 2009