As long as I’m promoting all things Hitachi, I want to mention that I will be speaking about sustainable IT and the role of storage at the upcoming Storage Networking Conference in October. I look forward to seeing you there if you can make it and continuing the dialogue.

McKinsey & Co. published a widely circulated paper last year “Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Efficiency” which was centered around proper mapping of infrastructure to business requirements, but based on their research clearly showed that on the server/application side the impact of optimized utilization with use of tools such as virtualization. This same premise applies to the storage side of the infrastructure stack and is complementary. This end-to-end virtualization approach needs greater attention and education in solving data center efficiency challenges. SNIA published a Best Practices guide for energy efficient data centers as well, which strongly recommends the use of virtualization software and compression techniques such as de-duplication. Here’s hoping the EPA will adjust its spec to accomodate all the relevant drivers for efficiency.

I couldn’t help but think of that scene when the blog and Twitter cognoscenti descended upon HDS yesterday after our High Availability Manager announcement, essentially asking “great, but why doesn’t it go up to eleven?”.  Because that’s not the point Nigel (even though we have awesome scalability and performance numbers).  Credible people who studied the facts and understand the big picture – i.e. helping customers make “beautiful music” within IT see what we are doing perfectly well.  And in fact, the customers using our over 12,000+ virtualization controllers today seem to get it just fine also.  We already have the best “instrument” in the market today, and we continue to make it better and better.  With High Availability Manager, customers NEVER have to worry about downtime (and the associated cost!) – due to component failures and also, just as importantly, during data migration projects.  And why Thomson Reuters wanted to participate and endorse what we are doing here – they see real tangible business value in the migration capabilities.  This is completely unique in the industry.

Now, let us focus on some numbers.  With our USP-V systems, on average our customers save 20% in costs per year and improve utilization by 40%.  We have helped customers reclaim up to 65% of their existing “lost” storage capacity from other vendors’ products like EMC and HP.  THESE are the types of numbers that matter, just ask our customers around the world.  So let’s please refocus the conversation back to customer value.

Finally, more numbers that matter to us – did you happen to catch what Jack Domme, our CEO, said yesterday?  In our fiscal FY08 just concluded, we grew the business 11% year-over-year based on constant currency in a tumultuous global economy.  Comparing that to EMC’s storage business during the same period, we outgrew them by 2X!!!   Perhaps that is why they and their minions are all in a tizzy in the blogophere?  Oh right Nigel, but yours “goes up to eleven”.

Attendees in Orlando should be asking EMC questions about a real commitment to green technology. I suppose recycling prevailing opinions is their way approaching industry events with a green thumb. Keeping my eye out for anything new or interesting—so feel free to send along.

Right now there is an initiative to apply this same methodology to computer storage (by the way, a “computer server” ENERGY STAR spec is about to be published).  This is welcome news to many, but will require the requisite amount of review and discussion before it gets ratified by the EPA. 

Go here if you want to learn more or stay informed:
www.energystar.gov/datacenters

Tony Asaro points out many of the questions that clearly remain and we will be interested to see if any answers emerge any time soon.  I also noticed the V-Max’s claim to consume 20% less power per TB.  I sure hope so, especially when you’re stacking that much storage inside a single “virtual” frame.  We’ll see about all this, but I for one am Max’ed out from all the hype and patiently await the proof so we can really see whether this new box is revolutionary or simply another attempted extension of the good old days.

I’ll be interested to see what the hot buzz will be this time around (other than, hey SNW is still here!).  Plans for the adoption of flash disk within storage systems, who else is getting serious about storage virtualization and how hot cold or lukewarm the cloud will be are just a few things I’ll key my eye on.  I see cloud is heavy on the agenda this time around. 

At the same time, my colleauge Hu Yoshida will be presenting the economic advantages of storage virtualization which should garner the usual large crowd.  Look for Hu to touch on some of the real tangible advantages related to storage reclamation I mentioned in one of my previous blogs (the one where we….ahem…helped a major company reclaim a couple million dollars of wasted unused EMC storage).

p.s. and I promise not to take self-indulgent pictures of myself and post them here

Well, wouldn’t you know it, IBM comes out and announces it has developed a new platform called SWIM (Strategic Water Information Management) designed to better manage and distribute water, including wastewater. I read about this recently on Kevin Ferguson’s blog on Informationweek. Seems IBM is nicely positioned to take advantage of those Obama stimulus dollars targeted for local water infrastructure needs. But I found the really interesting stuff to be in Cora Nucci’s post – this time IBM has apprently figured out a way to make semiconductor technology into membranes that reject toxic salts. Not sure how or where it will be effective but what this means is that clean water technology appears to be advancing at a necessary pace. Worth keeping eye on as we continue to focus on the other critical utility, power.

What is driving the growing demand for Green technology in Europe?

Alec-
There are two primary factors I refer to as PUSH vs. PULL.

PUSH Factors are regulatory and compliance driven. The European Union member states have driven low greenhouse gas (GHG) technologies with vendor driven directives such as WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) and REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals). Currently eco-product directives are being developed, however these will only be available for domestic IT products (e.g. laptops, printers) and not enterprise IT products such as storage arrays.

PULL Factors are corporate policy and competitive factors. Carbon neutrality and a low carbon supply chain are competitive differentiators. European corporations are consistently setting corporate targets for GHG emission reductions, including CEO sponsored initiatives. These targets are being allocated across the executive organisation, including the CIO. CIO and their staff have rapidly begun monitoring and baselining their GHG footprint, defining measurable targets and verifying their savings. With the arrival of data centre metrics (e.g. PUE) even data centre total energy is a measurable and competitive differentiator.

What role are governments playing in this dynamic?

Alec-
Governments are providing an essential role in (a) education of the emissions arising from the IT industry (b) industry and stakeholder engagement. They are also fueling the demand for Green IT with advanced green procurement standards. Governments are issuing their departments with hard GHG reduction goals (defense, revenues and customs, environmental agencies). Even local federal councils or small education authorities are demanding Green IT solutions.

As a result, do you believe European companies are on the forefront of implementing Green IT?

Alec-
Yes I’d have to admit that there is significant leadership available in the European sector. Green procurement standards in Europe are evolving at pace. As a default our public sector prospects and customers in the UK are requesting greenhouse gas emissions TCO rather than traditional fiscal TCO. Several of our customers participated in the Carbon Disclosure Supply Chain carbon reporting program where customers requested suppliers to submitted data on their carbon footprints. It is common practice to encounter a Head of Sustainable IT in our European customer IT organisation. Pretty good considering that Europe does not yet have tax/carbon incentives for IT available in United States (for example PG&E’s incentive program).

So what is so compelling about Hitachi’s Green Storage strategy, and how is it being received in Europe?

Alec-
Hitachi Data Systems sustainability leadership is widely recognized by the market. Of the many products and solutions we manufacture, we are not perceived to produce “greenwash”. Our goal is simple and measurable – to distribute energy efficient IT products. This is exactly what the market demands. They are not interested in solutions that plant a few trees but the product continues to blast out greater than 12 tons of CO2 per 1TB very five years! (hello 3PAR and their InServ storage server). The market also demands eco-products based on design for environment (DfE). While our peers scramble to launch in 2010 their 1st eco-products and adopt design for environment standards, Hitachi Data System has over ten years leadership. Hitachi first introduced design for environment standards in 1999! The Storage Systems Division became the first Hitachi unit to acquire the BS7750 environmental management systems certification from the British Standards Institute in 1996. Today our storage products available to the market are qualified either as eco-products or super eco-products based on international self-declaration standards. The AMS 2000 family are super eco-products as a result of the adoption of idle management technologies. I do believe myself to be fortunate in being a green champion for a truly green company.

How did HDS do this? Software. And some very smart Services folks that a) quickly diagnosed MegaCorp’s problem (96 old EMC frames, many sitting in silos unconnected to the SAN, with terabytes of unused capacity), b) developed and executed a data migration plan (leveraging Hitachi Storage Virtualization technology to seamlessly bring into an multi-vendor interconnected environment), and then c) reclaimed over 180 terabytes of existing storage (using Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning). All in all, about $4M in cost avoidance, including the capital outlay as well as future maintenance. That’s not even counting OPEX savings or the future savings associated with environmental costs for power and cooling that would have been required. And not to be overlooked, this entire process required practically no down time and about 30min of the System Admin’s time. (You may ask why they didn’t just work with EMC, it’s their storage right? – Good question. Simple answer is that they couldn’t get it done without more cost, disruption and perpetuation of the same problem).

Typically I don’t like to use this space to so blatantly promote HDS’ capabilities, since I obviously have a bias (while I’m at it, check out what Steve Duplessie had to say about us recently). But MegaCorp’s example is now being replayed over and over again at companies all over the world. In times when budgets for everything are tight it’s great to see some tangible working solutions to these problems.