The process of stepping into virtualization for a customer should not be overly complex or costly, after all the value proposition of virtualization is to simplify, not to complicate, says Adrian De Luca, Director, Storage Solutions, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, in an interaction with CIOL.
Adrian also explains Hitachi's go to market strategy for India and how company is committed to introduce new market solution in the coming years to meet the demands of storage industry.
CIOL: Please give us a brief of Hitachi's go to market strategy for India and also plans for the storage business in India.
Hitachi is committed to helping organizations of all sizes reduce IT cost and complexity, manage risk, and increase operational efficiency by delivering services oriented storage solutions that closely align storage infrastructure with business requirements.
We are the only vendor that can address all your storage requirements based upon a single integrated platform including virtualisation, common management, tiered storage, and common data protection.
Hitachi is delivering this vision today via its Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy (SOSS). SOSS is a business-centric framework for aligning IT storage resources with constantly changing business requirements. It provides a dynamic, flexible platform of integrated storage services enabling users to optimize storage infrastructure while reducing cost and complexity.
This strategy is the next evolution of Application Optimized Storage (AOS) announced in 2004 and introduces new levels of virtualization, management, and application support for businesses small and large.
Hitachi understands that not all applications are created equal. That is why at the core of its strategy, we are focused on delivering block, file and object based storage services to applications that deliver the right capacity, performance, protection and availability requirements of those business systems.
To manage this environment effectively, Hitachi Data Systems also provides the tools to manage the critical metrics to ensure service levels, recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, chargeback rates and utilisation levels. Deep experience with implementing these solutions together with Best practices will ensure that customers can easily and sustainable manage their IT services to the business.
We believe that this strategy will resinate well, particularly in the Indian where many companies are facing huge growth, pressures from competitors and tightening government or industry regulations. This will require them to innovate and find efficiencies in their IT environments and we believe a Solutions Oriented Storage Solution can help them achieve that.
CIOL: Does the company have any specific solutions targeting the SMB segment in India? How bullish is Hitachi in this segment?
With regards to the SMB/SME market, Hitachi has been playing in the market for seven our eight years now with the release of its modular series of storage - the 5800 series in the late nineties, the Thunder 9200 and 9500 series, and now the Advanced Modular Storage (AMS) and Workgroup Modular Storage (WMS) series more recently.
These storage platforms have provided customers with unprecedented levels of capacity to consolidate their IT environments and performance to drive the needs their critical applications like E-mail, file servers and web services.
In 2005, Hitachi is fundamentally changed the playfield field by introducing the Network Storage Controller (NSC). This new category of storage system (as defined by IDC) introduced enterprise functionality such as Virtualisation, enhanced Business Continuity and Mainframe connectivity to a modularly scalable platform. The NSC is yet another example of how Hitachi is a thought and execution leader in the storage industry by introducing the SME market to enterprise functionality, effort and risk in managing information assets and a reasonable cost.
Hitachi Data Systems has also built the Services Oriented Solutions Lab in Bangalore, India to accelerate its channel partner training program, and provide customers with the ability to conduct Proof of Concepts and test their solutions prior to deployment.
CIOL: How does Hitachi distinguish itself from the other data storage players in the market? What kind of data storage technologies is Hitachi betting on in future and what would the growth drivers for the company? Could you elaborate on the kind of data storage portfolio Hitachi provides to customers?
Hitachi's strategy of leveraging its virtualization technology in the Universal Storage Platform – V (USP-V) and Networks Storage Controller (NSC) are helping customers consolidate their storage assets, and realizing cost reductions far easier than any other vendor on the market.
These virtualization platform enables customers to deploy key storage services such as Multi-tear Fibre Channel storage, High Performance NAS, Active Archiving and Virtual Tape Library solutions and leverage a common pool of storage assets. By doing this, customers can introduce new capabilitites in their environment such as storage tiering to align the cost of storage to the value of information, data mobility to non disruptively move storage between tiers and increase/ decrease performance, and easily deal with technology refresh without incurring a resource intensive and risky data migration.
While the competition is delivering point solutions (FC Storage, Archive, VTL, etc) for different storage needs and still working on getting their virtualisation technology right, Hitachi is allowing its customers to step past this and realize the benefits that virtualization can bring today.
Another key benefit of this unified approach is that Hitachi can deliver a single storage management and business continuity approach across all its storage solutions, whether its Fibre Channel SAN, SATA, NAS, Archive or VTL, using the HiCommand Suite of tools. Other vendors on the market have point management tools for each silo of storage they provide which makes its expensive and cumbersome for customers to use.
CIOL: As traditional storage strategies become increasingly inadequate, new alternatives are rising to the challenge. What are the key trends that will impact the enterprise storage market in the next few years? A detailed description with reference to trends in Virtualization.
Virtualization is the key strength in Hitachi's strategy. Virtualization for the sake of virtualization does not provide any real benefit, unless the customer understands how to use it in their business.
Hitachi believes that the process of stepping into virtualization for a customer should not be overly complex or costly, after all the value proposition of virtualization is to simplify, not to complicate. This is why Hitachi decided to introduce storage virtualization inside the array in the USP and NSC, as opposed to outside it or in the network. For Hitachi, virtualization is an extension of what the array already does such as RAID protection, Business Continuity, etc.
Virtualization outside the array introduces additional components (appliances, switches, etc) which become another point of management and some of these solutions even require you to replace existing components like the storage network which can be very costly.
Once the virtualisation puzzle has been solved, customers can get onto realising the benefits such as consolidating assets to reduce footprint and infrastructure costs, storage tiering to align the cost of storage to the value of the data, data mobility to seamlessly moving applications from one type of storage to another to increase performance or enable technology refresh.
Hitachi Data Systems believes the next level after this is policy based dynamic tiered storage led by applications. With the virtualization technology in place, a way to non disruptively move it, the storage infrastructure is ready to respond to application triggers or policies to move the data at will. This will require integration with application providers, however many framework's already exist such as Oracle's Automated Storage Management (ASM) and SAP's Adaptive Computing which can be used and expanded to make this happen.
CIOL: Can you elaborate on Hitachi's new virtualization software and also on Universal Storage Platform
The pre-requisite software to enable virtualization in the Universal Storage Platform is Universal Volume Manager (UVM).
Hitachi Universal Volume Manager software provides the virtualization of a multi-tiered storage area network comprised of heterogeneous storage systems. It enables the operation of multiple storage systems connected to a Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform as if they were all in one storage system and provides common management tools and software. The shared storage pool comprised of external storage volumes can be used with storage system-based software for data migration and replication, as well as any host-based application.
To manage the storage assets, HiCommand Device Manager allows you to discover and manage the configuration and provisioning of all the heterogeneous storage assets. The Provisioning Assistant is a value-added component that enables administrators to integrate and manage various models and types of storage systems as a single, virtual storage pool, allowing storage administrators to do more with less.
HiCommand Tiered Storage Manager software enables IT administrators to transparently, non-disruptively, and interactively migrate data across heterogeneous storage systems to match application Quality of Service requirements to storage attributes. It also provides a management methodology for deploying available assets through the virtualization of storage internal and externally attached to a Universal Storage Platform V, Universal Storage Platform, or Network Storage Controller.
HiCommand Tiered Storage Manager provides a Graphical Interface to manage large sets of volumes assigned into multiple storage assets, enabling administrators to easily create and work with Migration Groups and Storage Tiers, while reducing the effort in targeting volume placement.
To help administrators make more informed and intelligent choices of where to place their data, HiCommand Tuning Manager software provides intelligent and proactive monitoring, reporting, and forecasting capabilities of storage resources with a focus on business applications, such as Oracle®, Microsoft, SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange and IBM DB2. Fully integrated with the HiCommand Suite, performance metrics can be exposed from Tuning Manager into HiCOmmand Tiered Storage Manager as a metric in the storage tier policy.
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CIOL: What are the factors that are driving storage innovation?
The main factors driving innovation in the storage industry is the sheer growth being experienced by organizations, the need to reduce cost, risk and complexity, as well as a rapidly evolving regulations being imposed and government and industry levels.
Most customers know that throwing more hardware (or software) at the problem will not necessarily make things better. It is all about streamlining what they have and making them more efficient.
One example of tackling this is by removing duplication in the environment. If an e-mail with a document attachment is sent by one employee to 100 of his/her colleagues, why should be stored 100 times? Technologies like Single Instance Storage (SIS) in the Hitachi Content Arching Platform (HCAP) can identify these scenario's and only store the data once, whilst transparently making it available to all employees.
Similarly, technologies such as HyperFactor in Hitachi's VTL solution with diligent can identify duplicate data during the backup process and reduce backup storage by as much as 25:1. These "de-dupe" technologies are revolutionising the way customers store their data and helps them contain the explosive growth.
To dive up storage utilisation levels, "thin provisioning" is becoming a popular technology to more closely align utilisation to allocation. Today, most companies are allocating more storage than they actually need to their servers and applications.
If true application consumption is not measured or known, this it is likely that organisations are provisioning far more than they need, which increases costs on all fronts – more storage capacity than is needed in arrays, more power to run it, more floor space required to house it. "Thin Provisioning" is a way to aloocate storage from a pool only when it is being requested, thereby being able to keep the pool in better check and reduce the amount of physical storage needed.
CIOL: How is India contributing to the growth in the storage industry as a market?
India has one of the highest CAGR in storage business among all the countries in APAC. So, it's share in the overall storage market in APAC is increasingly becoming more and more important.
That apart, with Indian economy growing at a healthy rate of 8-9%, most Indian companies have requirements that are at par with requirements in many large and mature economies like US. That said, we see some Indian companies as early adopters of new technologies. Such installations, provide inputs to technology companies on enhancing the product portfolio for early majority customers.
Apart from this, India's large and growing SMB segment warrants products that are designed keeping in mind very specific requirements of this segment. Gone are the days when this segment would accept stripped version of higher end product. This segment wants products that cater to its specific needs leading to product innovation. SMB segment has also contributed to channel development as selling into segment is challenged by geographical spread. Hence, many companies have found unique ways to cover this segment leading to process innovation which can be adopted in other countries.
Another interesting aspect is that India is looked as talent pool for delivery of storage services in other countries across APAC, Europe and America.
CIOL: What are the challenges faced by enterprises in data storage-
The biggest challenges as we see them are growing capacity requirements, the need to keep complexity low, the need to manage risk and the requirement to comply with government or industry based regulations.
CIOL: Which are the major verticals that are driving data storage market?. And also how are data storage needs of devices like mobile phones, cameras, etc. driving the storage market
Most industry verticals are facing growth in their data storage which is certainly fueling the data storage market. Most enterprises today have applications like e-mail, file servers and web servers.
However, we certainly see larger requirements coming from Telecommunications, Resources and Utilities, Banking and Finance, IT services and Government
Telecommunication providers are more and more becoming content providers as they deliver innovative services over the internet, mobile phone and in some cases over satellite or cable. As they march toward serving to please the content hungry consumer, all this rich video, audio and other media consumes massive amounts of adapt capacity that must be served quickly, especially in a market like India who has hundreds of millions of subscribers.
In the Resources and Utilities sector (oil, gas, electricity, etc), the need to store large amounts of geospatial data to satisfy hungry emerging economies grows at phenomenal rates. As the price of things like oil and gas rise, resource companies are going back to analyse old data that was previously too expensive to mine, but as demand and prices rise, may become profitable to extract. This involves recovering data that is ten years old or more to begin modelling. In the Utilities sector, project such as "smart metering" to automatically collect usage metrics at the home are making customer billing more dynamic, reliable and cost effective.
Banking and Finance are also innovating as they release more enticing products onto the market for consumers, keep up with growing global share markets and need to model more historical data to make more prudent financial decisions for their customers.
Government is also showing strong signs of innovation as they make more and more of their services available online for their citizens to access. In some countries now, tax returns can be done completely online without the need for an accountant.
CIOL: Managing storage rather than buying storage is proving to be costly. How does Hitachi come help enterprises to reduce cost and improve on the ROI of companies?
Some studies have shown that it costs as much as $4 to manage every $1 of storage hardware purchased, this can be indeed a huge burden and cost for an organization who is seeing their storage assets grow by 50% or more year on year.
Hitachi is trying to tackle this problem in a number of ways.
Firstly using "de-dupe" technologies such as Single Instance Storage (SIS) in the Hitachi Content Archiving Platform (HCAP) and HyperFactor in Diligent VTL solutions to avoid storing data unless we have to.
Another new technology Hitachi introduced in June with its USP-V series is Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, this is "thin provisioning" for the enterprise, arguably the area of the market seeing the biggest growth and have the largest storage assets.
Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software allows storage to be allocated to an application without actually being physically mapped until it is used. This "just-in-time" provisioning de-couples the provisioning of storage to an application from the physical addition of storage capacity to the storage system to achieve overall higher rates of storage utilization.
Another way in which Hitachi is helping customers lower the cost of managing storage is by providing a single, common suite of storage management tools across its entire product range. By using one method, process and user interface, companies can standardise their storage management practices and do not need to pay for multiple layers of software which all use their own configuration and provisioning methods to get the job done. It also means that less staff need to be trained on multiple products reducing the amount of education required.
The third way Hitachi is helping customers reduce storage management costs is by leveraging the virtualisation technology to automate tasks that would have otherwise been accomplished with multiple resources. Data migrations are p[particularly expensive and risky, they require multiple people from different areas of IT (Network, System, Application and Storage administrators) to come together, plan, assess and execute the move.
Using tools like HiCommand Tiered Storage Manager, organisations can classify their data by tier, know exactly where all their storage is and orchestrate the data migration without making any physical changes in their environment and reducing the amount of people involved since it uses a well define, robust and automated way to move the data.
CIOL: What is your take on the tape versus disc technology issue? Do you think tape is getting phased out?
The Tape dooms-dayers have been predicting the demise of tape for over twenty years, yet we still have it with us today.
The fact is the role of tape in today's IT environment is still relevant, although it has changed somewhat compared to days gone by.
As the amount of storage capacity has increased, and the need to recover it quickly has emerged due to the 24/7 enterprise, tapes and tape drive technology have struggled to maintain the speed and performance required to keep up, most of this is just mechanical and physics.
This, together with the rapid decline in the cost per gigabyte of storage and the various choices in disk technology are now available (fibre channel , serial ATA, parallel ATA, etc) have opened the way for Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) to take over at least some of the responsibility of data protection. The real attraction of VTL's is that they offer super fast recovery times (due to the fact they have large disk-based storage pools behind them) with the benefits of being backward compatible with real tape libraries as they emulate how they work. This means the change required in backup software products are minimal.
Another factor that has been changing the role of tape is the fact that certain data needs to be stored for longer periods than ever before, in many cases longer than tape was designed for. If stored in the right conditions, a tape should be recoverable even after ten years, however this is no longer practical in today's world.
In some areas and industry's, data like e-mail is required to be kept for seven years or at worst, for the duration on a person life (healthcare). With the deterioration of physical tapes if stored incorrectly, technology refresh cycles of tape libraries being three to five years and the amount of manual effort involved in restring data if it needs to be called up makes tape too cumbersome, inconvenient and expensive to be used. Once again, disk-based technology provides far better reliability, recoverability times and an easier way to manage technology refresh. This is why we are seeing the rise in popularity in large scale archive systems like the Hitachi Content Archiving Platform (HCAP).
Tape is being used today more for tier 4 or 5, rather than tier 2 which has been traditionally the case. Customers are building more sophisticated information lifecycle management practices in their environment to snapshot their data on fast disk for a few days for rapid recovery, VTL for 30 to 90 day recovery, disk-based archive platforms for multi year recovery and the tape drive and library has been relegated for true offline, off-site recovery. Tape is also being used to take back-up's of back-up's as he last resort in case of an unlikely total infrastructure failure.
