Storage Nation

Andy Kyte from Gartner was been sounding the alarm for data center modernization for a number of years. He warns that the data center is headed for a train wreck

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.

Five Requirements for Storage Virtualization In my previous blog, I identified the following requirements for Storage Virtualization. The first two requirements were already identified by SNIA in 2001. The additional three requirements are addressed by Hitachi in our implementation of Storage virtualization in the USP V/VM. These five requirements are: 1

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

Today, SNIA announced the first vendors to demonstrate their commitment to management interoperability by passing the Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP) provider suite for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) version 1.4. These vendors included Brocade, EMC Corporation, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, and Hitachi Ltd

After posting my blog on increasing storage utilization with Dynamic Provisioning , I visited a very large customer who was in the process of implementing thin provisioning from different vendors. Our Dynamic Provisioning on the USP V was the first to go live. Thin provisioning from other vendors were still undergoing evaluation.

Last week  the Register’s Chris Mellor covered EMC’s intention to propose  “unified storage/server systems  that span the globe and function as a single virtual resource pool, using YottaYotta technology” as announced by Pat Gelsinger, EMC’s president and COO of Information Infrastructure Products group. Those who were in the storage business during and after the dot com phase at the turn of the century, remember the dozens of startups that were trying to leverage the introduction of Storage Area Networking with storage virtualization appliances. EMC also entered the market with a storage virtualization appliance called Invista

One of the objectives of storage virtualization is to separate the management of the physical storage from the application, the server, and the network view of the storage, so they can continue to operate while the storage is refreshed, tuned, migrated, maintained, replicated, or replaced.

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.

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