Storage Nation

Last week Hitachi Data Systems held their first blogger day, which was attended by 10 bloggers who cover the IT space.

A new survey by Intercall shows that 48 percent of americans who use technology in their everyday jobs say that they are now required to do more work with fewer resources due to the current economic climate.

Since 1988, the Computerworld Honors Program has been recognizing and documenting the achievements of men, women, organizations and instututions around the world whose visionary use of information technology promotes positive social, economic and educational change. We are pleased to announce that five Hitachi Data Systems customers have been selected as the 2010 Computerworld Honors Laureate award winners by IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program. These Hitachi Data Systems customers will be recognized during the 22nd Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony & Gala Awards Evening on June 7, 2010 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

A Computerworld article by Bernard Golden highlights an IDC report that says that the “digital Universe” will grow by 1.2 zeta bytes or 1.2 million peta bytes in 2010. One of the biggest issues with this increasing data growth is the ability to search for that particular piece of data that you need.

The down turn in the economy has been difficult for many IT Shops as it has been for many of the storage vendors. Our strategy during this down turn has been to focus on the needs of our customers and help them increase the utilization of their storage assets and the reduce their operational costs. When we entered this down turn in 2008, IT shops were typically running at about 30% to 40% utilization with most of their data on expensive tier 1 storage. Through offerings like Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and Zero Page Reclaim we were able to help some customers reclaim as much as 40% of their allocated unused storage and reduce their need to buy more capacity during this down turn

SNIA defined storage virtualization in 2001 and focused on two important requirements. First was the abstraction of storage functions to enable application and network independent management of storage and data. Second was the application of virtualization to add new capabilities to lower level storage resources

While the need for storage continues to increase, there seems to be a trend in the decline of modular storage business for some of the major storage vendors. This may be due to the aging of the traditional modular storage architecture. This architecture was designed over 20 years ago  for direct attach to open systems storage

I was recently asked by an analyst firm to review a survey that they intended to send to end users to evaluate the extent of virtualization in the data center. While most of the survey asked very relevant questions, when it came to storage virtualization, it was all over the map, primarily because there was no clear definition of storage virtualization

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.

My fellow HDS bloggers Ken Wood and Michael Hay have been using the term Cartesian scaling to describe what I call Scale up and Scale out . Cartesian scaling is the ability to scale in two directions, up and out. I have resisted using this term since I thought it sounded too technical to describe what I thought was a simple concept. (The term Cartesian comes from the French philosopher Rene Descartes who wrote a paper Discourse on the Method , where he introduces a way to order objects on paper using two intersecting axes as a measuring guide