Christophe's Corner

As many of you already know, Hitachi Data Systems partners with technology leaders like Brocade to deliver complete solutions to our customers… and Business Continuity/Business Resilience is a natural fit for both companies.   The core infrastructure is truly the heart of the datacenter supporting everything users have come to rely on to get their job done and meet their business objectives – whatever they may be.  Things are taking a new twist with virtualization these days.

This post is not so much about a great partnership as it is about a friend we recently lost.  I think it was 2 or 3 years ago when we organized a great session on Business Continuity at the Brocade Conference in Las Vegas.   We asked Tom Clark from Brocade to co-moderate (with BC expert Steve Woolley) a session with a group of our joint customers.  A great discussion that we held in a fantastic boardroom that looked like a million bucks, which was the unit of measurement these customers used to describe the benefits from the solutions they implemented from both Brocade and HDS.   Okay, it was Vegas, and we had an open bar in the end, but that was after we talked risk mitigation, RPO, RTO and estimated savings numbers… I swear.

But let’s go back to Tom.  Many of us here at Hitachi had the distinct privilege of working with Tom Clark.  I know I did at least a couple of webcasts with him.  The HDS team is deeply saddened to hear of his passing.  As my colleague Angela MaGill said “His enthusiasm for technology was infectious” – he will be missed.  Tom was a SAN expert, and just Google his name + storage and you will be humbled by his contributions to our industry.

It’s not “only storage” in the end.   It’s people.