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Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Year 2006 will soon be behind us, and a challenging new year approaches. Bellwethers indicate a fast growth in storage with faster growth in areas involved with data protection. Vendors have been trying to battle it out to gain total supremacy for years. IT managers realized long ago that its RoI on storage technolgies is important, but vendors have not. But, still vendors keep on inventing the storage wheel. Recently, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) with its innovation in storage virtualization connected itself with IT managers at CIO Summit.
On the Virtualization Path
Hu Yoshida, CTO, HDS, admitted that storage is oversubscribed and underutilized. "More is spent on maintaining the old because it becomes too disruptive to migrate. Also, multivendor storage keeps price competitive but adds to management costs. Cost has become crucial and should be spent in technologies that can give RoI," he added.
Undoubtedly, its cheaper to buy storage today rather than hire people to manage it. Today, CIOs don't want to give up what they already have. They want additional capabilties to be added to the existing technologies, which is much cheaper than migrating to a completely new concept, which they are not sure on ROI. Storage virtualisation is one such concept.
It isn't a new concept, but it's getting a lot of attention lately as the top storage vendors launch next-generation virtualization wares. The vendors vary on their approaches; some put virtualization in the network, while others put it at the edge or in the array. But, they all attack the same basic problem-simplifying storage management. Hitachi, with its storage virtualisation concept has been able to convince IT managers that there is more to tape and disc storage.
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'We not only sell concept, but also provide support and services'
- Hu Yoshida, CTO, HDS
What technology initiatives have you taken so far to face competition?
We continue to focus on our core area, which is intelligent control. We have already tapped the SMB market with this product and are getting good response. Apart from this, we continue with our consulting services and storage virtualization strategy, which is giving our customers, value for money and we are far ahead from our competitors in this area.
Why HDS is focussing so much on storage virtualization?
This is one area where every vendor wants to be, but none of them have gone to customers with their virtualization products. We have already made inroads to it and our customers are quite happy with it. We not only sell concept, but also provide support and services, for which we have very capable partners. Also, we have software solution to support these. Overall we provide complete solutions and satisfaction to the customers.
What is your consulting services all about?
Today CIOs don't want vendors to come and sell their products. They know very well about the products and its value. What is required is to provide consultancy in terms of technology integration, RoI and if required smooth transition to the new technology. They look forward to see how vendors can help them do it. We provide them with consultancy on technology for business applications and services.
Today SAN is gaining grounds while NAS seems to be losing its foothold. How do you foresee the adoption of these technologies among enterprises?
SAN will be here for sometime. It is a guaranteed delivery platform and combined with IP, it gives excellent results. And, though NAS as a solution has been loosing ground given other most cost effective solutions for the enterprise market, I opine that both NAS-SAN will co-exist. Both, NAS and SAN are growing at a tremendous rate around the world. If we look globally, both are neck to neck, and with the recent adoption of iSCSI, the lines between NAS and SAN are blurring. But, sooner or later virtualization will become a mainstream.
Where do you see the next phase of growth coming from in storage segment?
We are seeing acceleration and growth potential in some areas. Storage consolidation is happening and underutilization of storage is an opportunity. Secondly, government regulations and compliance will drive the demand of data protection and accountability of information. Also, new applications and the growth of email that needs to be organized and archived boost the demand for new storage capacity. Noticeable increase in demand for storage service from the SMB market will continue. Verticals like finance, telco, government and manufacturing are the top industries for storage revenue. In addition, we predict a greater need for our mid market solutions and storage software growth.
What is driving HDS growth today?
Hitachi's virtualization strategy is rapidly gaining traction. Only Hitachi offers common software tools and management interfaces across all products, giving customers the power of a single replication engine across all assets. Competitor's portfolio of unrelated acquisitions leads to islands of insanity for clients. Hitachi has successfully ported industry-leading high-end functionality to the midrange, bringing enterprise-class features to the broader midrange and SMB marketplace. Network Storage Controller is mirroring Universal Storage Platform's industry momentum.
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Virtualizing storage has differnet methods. These methods are characterized by whether the virtualization is done on the host, the storage array or the SAN.
HDS offers controller-based virtualization with its TagmaStore Universal Storage platform. It puts virtualization in the storage controller, either as a separate appliance or built into the array. Since controller-based virtualization is intimately connected to the storage arrays, controller-based products generally do an excellent job of working with the storage, especially in the event of errors or write failures.
The major drawback to controller-based virtualization is vendor lock-in. In fact, in most cases, customers are not just locked into a vendor, they are locked into a particular product line since storage controllers only work with one product line. Another disadvantage is that controllers, by nature, have the narrowest view of the SAN-essentially, they only see the storage array. But, HDS is riding high and claims to have around dozen installations in the country.
The Gameplan
Though Hitachi entered the Indian market a bit late - infact much later than its competitor EMC-the Japanese storage giant is making up for lost time. A growing reputation on reliability is helping Hitachi win more business. And, Hitachi has been subjected to less criticism than EMC on interoperability-one of the SAN industry's biggest problems.
The risk Hitachi runs is letting its focus on EMC, keeping it from capitalizing on opportunities to sell its solutions to smaller companies. Profit margins in the midsize market are slimmer, but revenue growth is enormous.
But, slowly HDS is changing its gears and has started focussing on SMB market as well. It is now enabling companies of all sizes to truly realize the business benefits of Application Optimized Storage solutions, as now even the smallest companies can enjoy the benefits of virtualization by optimizing the performance of their most pressing business applications - such as Microsoft Exchange or Oracle Financials - utilizing the logical partitioning capabilities of Hitachi's integrated new fleet of midrange offerings.
The challenge in front of HDS is to deliver world-class enterprise service to its top-tire customers with limited resources. Conventional midrange storage leaves much of this market under-served. However, Hitachi has addressed this issue with the cost-effective network storage controller, delivering high-end function in a user-friendly form factor.
As organizations look to move beyond tape - currently the predominant storage medium for long-term retention-utilizing disk storage technology for backup and recovery operations has become an attractive method of improving reliability, reducing backup windows, achieving greater data throughput performance and ensuring rapid recovery. Until now, however, the migration to current disk-based solutions has been causing disruption and costly downtime in legacy IT systems. Hitachi Data Systems has virtual tape library solutions that requires no changes to existing backup policies, practices, or procedures.
Delivering on its plan to increase market share in SME worldwide, HDS has entered into a global distribution agreement with Ingram Micro, the world's largest technology distributor. Under the agreement.
Bolstering its high-end storage virtualization market leadership, HDS has shipped more than 4,500 intelligent virtual storage controllers worldwide, outpacing competitors still attempting to gain a foothold in this critical market
HDS is already on top as far as enterprise customers are concerned. HP and Sun Microsystems sell HDS boxes to their enterprise customers and HDS has no plans to compete with its partners in this space.
HDS is slowly and steadily making progress and has drawn some major expansion plans to gain foothold in the region. It is also continuously investing in its labs, which acts as demo centers to its customers.
Though HDS is making right moves, still lot needs to be done to be the king of storage times.
Rahul Gupta in Phuket
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in
Source: Voice&Data
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