BANGALORE, INDIA: Vivekanand Venugopal, vice president and general manager-India, Hitachi Data Systems, gets candid to CIOL in an interview and shares his thoughts on the acquisition spree in storage industry, its Virtualisation 5.0 and also how the conservative company is making bold statements with its latest offering - Hitachi VSP.

CIOL: What is Hitachi Data System Virtual Storage Platform (VSP)?

Vivekanand Venugopal: The VSP is primarily an enhancement of our overall technology platform. It is neither a product nor a technology announcement, but a culmination of our vision that we set out five years ago.

The vision was to help customers to build infrastructure cloud, content cloud and then help them to make the transition to 'information cloud'. 

Also Read: Overview: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

CIOL: Can you explain what do you mean by the terms infrastructure, content and information cloud?

Vivekanand: Cloud is neither a technology nor a service by itself. It is primarily how you use technology.

Factors such as reducing enterprise cost, data center transformation and work force improvement are calling for an infrastructure that is very fluid in nature. This is what we call an infrastructure cloud that helps you to provide IT services to business.

This infrastructure must be dynamic in nature, must align to business requirements non-disruptively, should have data centre characteristics and companies must be able to manage it using common software for both homogeneous as well as heterogeneous infrastructure.

Today, data is growing like never before. Although block data is flattening out, it represents only a mere 10 to 15 per cent of the total enterprise data.  However, unstructured data in data centres is growing at 60 to 65 per cent on a yearly basis. A content cloud is an infrastructure that enables you to manage this growth in content.

The third phase of that is, after building infrastructure cloud and then the content cloud, a company is capable of undertaking data centre transformation where it is migrating from managing data to managing information, where you are moving from managing information technology to providing information services. This is information cloud.

CIOL: Can you elaborate on the three dimensions (3D) that Hitachi VSP promises?

Vivekanand: The first dimension is what we call scale-up, which means, as a company builds and brings in high performance servers in its environment, it should also need a storage platform that can scale up in terms of performance.

Today, irrespective of upturn or downturn, we have seen data growing – in all three segments such as block, file and content – at 30-35 per cent. 

So, as capacity requirement grows, a company should also have a storage architecture that can scale out in terms of capacity. That makes the second dimension.

Studies say that only five per cent of IT spend that goes into innovation, whereas the rest of 90 to 95 per cent goes into software, hardware and data centre maintenance.

Moreover, 65 per cent of storage costs are pertaining to operational costs owing to factors such as legacy storage in data centres, low utilization of storage, too many software to manage storage, migration from one technology to another, downtime etc. So, companies are looking at ways to leverage IT investments effectively. 

Hitachi Virtualisation can consolidate heterogeneous storage, provides a common software to manage multi-vendor product, and data migration can be done without any downtime. This makes the third dimension, that is scale deep for heterogeneous virtualisation.

We call it Virtualisation 5.0. With the VSP, we are committing 33 per cent reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) in the first year. Moreover, customers can reduce storage disk costs by up to 70 per cent, environmental cost by 40 per cent and can also increase storage utilization by up to 85 per cent.