Storage Nation

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

 Hitachi Data Systems was the first vendor to deliver a switch based storage  architecture over ten years ago. Recently we are starting to see storage vendors deliver storage systems that include a switch in their architecture. However, the new switch architectures are designed for loose coupling  of modular storage nodes while the Hitachi architecture is designed for tight coupling of storage resources. In 2000, Hitachi Data Systems introduced the Lightning 9900 storage subsystem with an internal switch that tightly coupled Front End (FE) and Back End (BE) port processors through a global cache. This enabled any to any connection between the FE storage ports and the BE disk controllers.

IT costs are increasing about 7 to 8 % per year. But when you look at industry spend on storage hardware that spend has been flat for many years, primarily due to Moore’s law. Storage densities continue to double about every 18 months

While Cloud computing is touted as a new way to mask the complexity of the IT infrastructure and provide IT services as “a pay as you grow” service, these concepts  were introduced over 10 years ago with the service providers of the late 1990’s. These concepts were so appealing that they helped to fuel the dot com boom,  but disappeared in the dot com crash of 2001/2002. What has changed to make us think that a shared services model like cloud computing and cloud storage will be successful this time around? Key to the success of cloud storage providers, as with the dot com storage services providers (SSP) of earlier days, will be the ability to leverage their resources and be more efficient in managing the growth of storage compared to their end users.

Happy NewYear and welcome to 2010! I wish you all a healthy and productive new year. While the economy seems to be getting better, budget planners are still very cautious and so we will continue to see a drive to consolidate to reduce cost and thin down the fat to be more agile. Therefore data center virtualization will be a top priority for 2010.  We have already seen the adoption of server virtualization platforms with more competitive offerings and faster more powerful processors and networks becoming mainstream. The next major step in data center consolidation will be in the consolidation of storage through thin provisioning.

I would like to wish you all the best for the holidays. I will be taking some time off and will be back after New Years day.  Thanks to all of you who read this blog and special thanks to those who take the time to add your comments. Even if you don’t agree with me, I value and respect your perspective and will publish your comments.    I look forward to 2010 and future dialogue with you around the storage issues and thoughts of the day.

If you saw the comments by EMC’s Barry Burke to my last blog post, Barry give his explanation of how VMAX works.

EMC announced FAST version 1 this week and one of the more insightful articles was by Beth Pariseau of SearchStorage.com. I am fairly certain EMC briefed Beth on this announcement and that she had access to their references, so it’s safe to say her information is pretty accurate here are my thoughts on what I read in the PR and from Beth’s article:   Is EMC behind the competition? – Hitachi has had policy based file and LUN level tiering for some time

John Webster posted on the changing role of the IT Storage pro based on a conversation he had with the CIO of a large technology company. This CIO was speculating that the role of the storage administrator within IT operations is going away.  This CIO believes that the segregation of IT operational departments along technological boundaries, server, network, and storage, is disappearing due to virtualization and the convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet within the data center