Storage Nation

Those of you who subscribe to Gartner reports may have seen their recent report: “ Choosing Between Monolithic Versus Modular Storage: Robustness, Scalability and Price Are the Tiebreakers ” While I agree with some of their definitions of monolithic and modular storage, it is no longer a question of one versus the other. With the Hitachi USP V/VM we combine the best of both worlds, by providing a “monolithic” or enterprise tier 1 front-end with lower cost modular back-end storage. I agree with their description of monolithic storage as having many controllers that share direct access to a large, high performance, global cache, supporting a large number of host connections, including mainframes, and providing redundancy to ensure high availability and reliability. I also agree with their definition of modular storage, which contains two variants, a dual controller architecture with separate cache memory and a scale out architecture that can have many nodes with separate caches in each node.

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.

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 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

SNIA defined storage virtualization in 2001 and focused on two important requirements. First was the abstraction of storage functions to enable application and network independent management of storage and data. Second was the application of virtualization to add new capabilities to lower level storage resources

As you likely already know, Hitachi Ltd, our parent company, is celebrating its 100 th birthday this year.

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

In April I wrote about our “Switch IT On” program , which provides free software licenses to help current and new USP V customers leverage virtualization across their existing HDS and third party storage assets.

Chuck Hollis had an interesting observation on deduplication of primary data and I/O density . He points out that while deduplication is great for backup, archive, and large file repositories, it might not be as great for primary data. His reasoning is that dedupe can cause an increase in I/O density which may impact the performance of primary data and negate the value of space savings that dedupe could bring.

I am taking a break from the blogging wars over virtualization to plug a Webcast that I will be doing on The economic Benefits of Intelligent File Tiering.  It will be on Wednesday, September 30 from 9:00 am to 10:00 am. You can go to this website to register