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Hitachi Geek Day Summary

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:06:58 +0000

Hitachi Geek Day has been and gone and I’m back home in the UK recovering from quick turnaround jetlag. Originally this event was known as HDS Bloggers Day and in actual fact was a day and a half long. Somewhere along the line the Geek monika was adopted and has been retained for the page summary on the Hitachi website. You can find a link here . Background So what was this event all about? Well, Hitachi are looking to raise their image using social media in a way already pioneered by Hewlett Packard and the attendees of the Gestalt IT events. This Geek Day (as I shall refer to it from now on) is the starting process on this journey and was in some ways a “beta” test of how to do future events (hence the 0.9 designation). Initially I was skeptical as to what content Hitachi would choose to present. They are well known for their Enterprise and Modular storage arrays and I’m more than familiar with these, having designed, implemented and managed many implementations in the past. In fact, I’ve previously assisted Hitachi in software feature development and have reverse engineered the HiCommand products to suit my own requirements.

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Hitachi Geek Day Summary

Hitachi Bloggers Day: Day 0

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:10:11 +0000

Here I am again on the start of another vendor blogging day. As the title of this post suggests, this will be a trip to see Hitachi, or HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) if you prefer. The Bloggers Day is taking place over two days and is located in San Jose, just south of San Francisco in California. I’ve previously posted a list of the attendees, both from the blogging community and the Hitachi itself. The IT world has changed since I first encountered Hitachi 7700E, 9900 and the recent USP/USP V ranges of Enterprise storage arrays that typify Hitachi’s hardware portfolio. Enterprise and Modular storage now take equal billing and many of the features that were once Enterprise-only have migrated to the modular products, blurring the lines between the two platforms. In addition Hitachi have offerings for NAS and object store. They also sell servers (believe it or not). Is this a scenario that has occurred because of customer demand? Is it more likely that reliability and the virtualisation of everything means that the original premise of the enterprise array is no longer valid? I believe that we are seeing a gradual move from the network-centric data centre, via the storage-centric data centre to what will become the hypervisor-centric data centre and eventually application-centric cloud. Storage devices are no longer the place where data functionality is focused and it will be less so as time goes on. The logical place for data mobility will be in the hypervisor (at least the hypervisor will be the controlling entity) and storage will become a feature as networks are today. If this is right, then the concept of and need to differentiate Enterprise and Modular arrays will cease to exist

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Hitachi Bloggers Day: Day 0

Enterprise Computing: Hitachi Bloggers Day

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:46:14 +0000

This time next week I shall be in the middle of the first HDS Bloggers Day, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday 15/16th June 2010. I’m well versed in HDS (or Hitachi, depending on how they preferred to be known) storage products, mainly their large enterprise arrays. I doubt we’ll see revelations on the upcoming USP V replacement due in the autumn, however this event does offer me two things: Discussions on the wider Hitachi technology such as blades, unified computing & file/object stores Access to execs to find out what the Hitachi “strategy” is and how they intend to keep ahead of the competition. Taking the first point, it may not be obvious but Hitachi already sell a range of servers and recently announced they intend to join in the unified computing game. At this stage I can’t see how they’re intending to handle the network piece of the stack and am keen to understand how they will address that. In addition, as Hitachi sell servers and storage (and storage they themselves manufacture), I’d expect integration across the stack to be tight and slick (let’s see). The HP Blades Day earlier this year gave me insight into the issues involved in delivering a solid unified computing architecture; the Gestalt IT Field Day last year started that process off, looking at MDS Micro, Xsigo and VMware. Let’s hope HDS/Hitachi have something good up their sleeves. That takes us to the second point; access to execs. So far, we’ve been told the following execs will be present; I’ve listed them here with the Hitachi supplied bios (not my own words). I’m hoping to grab a few minutes with each, to do some video interviews. There are some tough questions to answer, not all technology-based, but rather around the way Hitachi approaches marketing & social media in general. Here’s the list: Hu Yoshida < http://blogs.hds.com/hu/ > - storage industry and virtualization thought leader, is VP and CTO at Hitachi Data Systems

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Enterprise Computing: Hitachi Bloggers Day

Enterprise Computing: 4 Pillars – Service: More On Chargeback

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:03:34 +0000

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management. Previous posts: The Four Pillars of Storage Management Four Pillars: Service Four Pillars: The Service Catalogue Four Pillars – Service: Chargeback In the previous article I discussed the subject of Billing and Chargeback. This entry discusses some of the issues raised in that post as additional considerations.

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Enterprise Computing: 4 Pillars – Service: More On Chargeback

Enterprise Computing: HP Blades Day – Lab Session – Part III

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 07:00:52 +0000

This is part of a series of posts with video recorded at the HP Blades Day in Houston, February 2010. Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 1 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 2 This is another post for the hardware geek in you. James Singer discusses fans; air moving devices is you’re familiar with the IBM lingo. You’d think fans weren’t that important, but in the C7000 chassis, they are super efficient. In fact, they were designed with the assistance of model aeroplane experts. A quick word of warning; this clip is a little noisy towards the end, when James demonstrates the fan’s power. Enjoy! Click here to view the embedded video

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Enterprise Computing: HP Blades Day – Lab Session – Part III

Enterprise Computing: The Exchange Storage Bandwagon

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:04:01 +0000

I love the late evening banter on Twitter, where a conversation between a number of individuals turns into a personal rant from yours truly. Tonight’s subject – performance management of Microsoft Exchange and overconfiguration of storage for email. Some 4 years ago, I was working for a large investment bank (which may now be defunct) and I did the storage configuration and testing for the new Exchange deployment. Having been called in at the last minute, I had to take the storage configuration provided by the previous experts and the vendor. This consisted of a DMX1000-P2 (performance model) and using only the fastest 50% of the drives. As the pre-deployment testing progressed, all MSFT Exchange servers were installed, configured and loaded with the Jetstress software to test performance. Unsurprisingly, as the setup had been so hideously over-configured, the testing concluded with flying colours. As I checked out the configuration of the individual servers, I found wide variations in their setup; HBAs at 1Gb/s rather than 2 (with HBAs on the same servers running at different speeds); drivers and firmware that were inconsistent; differences in the host logical volume layout. Despite all this, the configuration worked flawlessly, even with all of the intended production servers running stress loading at the same time. This isn’t the only over-configured Exchange implementation I’ve seen; another springs to mind that used 300GB drives as 146GB models. I’ve also seen the same attention given to Notes. In that instance, however, common sense prevailed and it became clear very quickly that each Notes server could be more heavily loaded with data and that there was no need to short-stroke the drives to achieve the desired throughput. Performance/capacity logic was applied and the configuration streamlined

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Enterprise Computing: The Exchange Storage Bandwagon

Enterprise Computing: 4 Pillars – Service: The Service Catalogue

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:58:53 +0000

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management. Previous posts: http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/05/04/enterprise-computing-the-four-pillars-of-storage-management/ http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/05/14/enterprise-computing-4-pillars-service/ As discussed previously, the Service Catalogue is a key component of delivering storage as a service.

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Enterprise Computing: 4 Pillars – Service: The Service Catalogue

Enterprise Computing: Six Reasons Why Tape is Still Alive and Kicking!

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:47:57 +0000

In homage to Calvin’s post of today, extolling the virtues of tape, I couldn’t help but create my own tongue-in-cheek version of his post. So here are my reasons tape still exists in the enterprise. Because we just spent $5million on huge automated tape libraries (that mount each tape on average once a year) on a 5 year depreciation cycle and historically libraries stay forever. Because someone manually changed the tape retention on hundreds of backups to “forever” and we have no idea why they are needed. If we delete them, chances are the authorities will sue our asses

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Enterprise Computing: Six Reasons Why Tape is Still Alive and Kicking!

Enterprise Computing: 4 Pillars – Service

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 08:00:21 +0000

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management. In this post, I’ll be discussing one of the four foundations, Service and what exactly that means. My Four Pillars of Storage Management are defined in this initial post

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Enterprise Computing: 4 Pillars – Service

Enterprise Computing: The Four Pillars of Storage Management

admin — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:42:14 +0000

I’m about to start a new series of posts discussing the whole process of Storage Management. I’m calling it the Four Pillars of Storage Management as there are 4 main components: SERVICE – Offering of services to business customers via a service catalog and measuring the ability to deliver to the business through KPIs and Service Level Agreements.

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Enterprise Computing: The Four Pillars of Storage Management