Storage Nation

This is the third part in my series on data center transformations. My last post was on server transformation and the impact of virtual servers on the data center. In this post I will address the impact of storage transformation on the data center. Data is at the core of the Data center Data is at the core of the data center, and any effort to transform the data center must involve the movement, provisioning, access, and protection of data which is provided by storage systems

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.

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likely that reliability and the virtualisation of everything means that the original premise of the enterprise array is no longer valid?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

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

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.

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

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

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

I’ve just been reading Greg Knieriemen’s post over at iknerd.com on the ending of Sun/Oracle’s OEM agreement with Hitachi to resell their high end storage arrays.  On the one hand I’m surprised by the announcement; on the other I’m not. Sun have resold Hitachi for some time under the 9990V and 9985V brand names.  These are no more than rebadged devices with Hitachi code and software under the covers.  From memory, I believe the only technical change is the cabinet door.  I have installed Sun supplied Hitachi technology in the past.  Sun provided no added value to the process – in fact when we encountered a microcode bug, Sun’s lack of knowledge hindered our problem resolution process