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

Paula Sequeira, posted This comment on my post on New Considerations for Tiered Storage .

Late last night I got an email from  Christopher Kusek asking about FICON Encryption of data at rest. “Hey Hu, I was reading a post from 2008 whereby it was stated that there was a solution for data at rest encryption over FICON? http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2008/10/green_encryption_for_storage.html Can you provide a little insight into this, and whether this story is true and there infact is a FICON DAR encryption solution?” Thank you! Christopher I thought I would answer it in this blog since others may have a similar question.

 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.

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.

Tiered Storage is one of the best ways to reduce storage costs if it can be done dynamically.

In a recent post by Martin Glassborow in Storagebod , he reviews the advantages of storage virtualization as provided by the USP V and IBM SVC, and ends with the following speculation: “So as we move to more scalable, efficient and automated environments; I wonder if we will look back at things like USP-V, SVC etc as a cul-de-sac driven by today’s necessity! Or perhaps they truly are the future?” Today I met with the new CIO of a very large customer who has a global agreement with us for storage. They have petabytes of USP and USP V storage frames. They are extremely happy with the reliability, availability, performance, and scalability of our USP products but they have not implemented storage virtualization. In the past when executives were asked why IT had not implemented storage virtualization, there were two answers

Yesterday, Hitachi announced the ability to cluster USP V/VM for high availability and non disruptive migration between current and future USP V/VM storage controllers.  Since the USP V/VM is able to virtualize external storage, this will be the first continuous availability solution for both internal and externally  attached heterogeneous storage, all under  common management. In fact this ability to cluster two separate control units over distance requires an  external disk attached to both control units to act as a quorum disk.  If the link between the two storage nodes is broken the quorum disk helps to identify which node is the correct node and which node needs to be fenced off.  If the quorum disk was internal to either of the two controllers it would not be able to provide the quorum function. So storage virtualization is required to make storage clustering work reliably. What is the difference between High Availability Manager and business continuity solutions like TrueCopy and Hitachi Universal Replicator ?

During these days of tight IT budgets, CIO’s are looking for ways to increase the utilization of their existing storage assets and reduce operational costs. HDS is announcing a promotion today that will help to address these requirements. This promotion, which begins May 6 and runs through the end of this year, will provide free software licenses to “switch on” third party storage systems to the virtualization services in the USP V . This offer provides four free licenses to help current and new USP V customers virtualize and leverage the services of the USP V across their existing third party storage assets