Storage Nation

Hamlet was depressed when he posed the question, “to be to not to be”. There was no questions in Barry Burk’s mind when StorageNerve asked Michael Hay “ Where is the Hitachi BINfile” and Michael answered “Hitachi doesn’t have the concept of a ‘BINfile’.” Barry’s immediate response was that “EVERY intelligent storage array has the equivalent of a Binfile”. Barry also makes the correction that the correct name is .BIN file.

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

The downturn in the economy has been difficult for many IT shops as it has been for many of the storage vendors. Our strategy during this downturn has been to focus on the needs of our customers and help them increase the utilization of their storage assets and reduce their operational costs.   When we entered this downturn 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

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

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

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.