Storage Nation

There is an increasing interest in storage virtualization as seen an the increasing number of articles and blog posts on storage virtualization. In the last few days Rick Vanover posted a very balanced overview of storage virtualization for Datamation where he reviewed some of the many options.   Carol Sliwa posted a Storage Pro Guide to block-based storage virtualization for SearchStorage which cited some use cases. One of the use cases was the City of Coquitlan (Canada) who is a 2010 Computerworld Honors Laureate award winners in IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program and a customer of Hitachi.

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.

Full Time Employee (FTE) per TB used to be a measure of productivity for storage managers. Some people still use that metric today. I submit that FTE per TB is no longer relevant today. For the last 10 years the mantra for IT has been “do more with less”

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

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.

A while back we did a storage assessment for a non HDS customer and showed him that his storage utilization was actually around 30% which is typical in most accounts. While that was not surprising to the operations people this was a surprise to the financial people who could not understand why 70% of their storage capacity, in this case, several hundred TBs, was not being utilized. Management was embarrassed and immediately fingers were being pointed at the storage architect and storage administrators, who in turn pointed to the application users who were asking for way more storage than they appeared to need.

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.

I was out of pocket last week supporting the EBC on the Road in Sweden. Kenneth Chang, who managers our Executive Briefing Centers in Sefton Park, UK and Santa Clara, California, recruits our executives to spend a week doing briefings for companies in locations outside of our EBCs so that we can get closer to our customers and prospects.  This has been helpful for many companies who have had to cut back on their travel expenses. Unlike other briefing centers that are staffed by dedicated presenters, our EBC briefings are done by product managers and executives who have direct responsibility for the products and solutions that they present

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