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.

We worked with TechValidate to poll our customers and I will be sharing some of these results with you on this blog from time to time.  HDS actually just issued a press release about the great return our customers reap from their storage assets and HDS’ unique capabilities.

No big secret, but  customers purchased their USPs to improve performance. Actually 86% of the organizations we surveyed increased their performance by 10 to 25% or more compared to other enterprise storage systems in their prior environment. In a majority of cases (over 50%) performance was the reason for purchasing the platform (source: TechValidate).

According to the survey, customers who purchased USPs found reduced operational costs between 10 and 25% of their storage administration costs  compared to prior environments.  With 2010 IT budgets not getting any looser, being able to do this for customers is huge.

Focusing on our File and Content Services portfolio, the survey also identified that 35% of IT organizations increased their application performance between 20 to 30% after deploying their Hitachi High-performance NAS platform; 52% of IT organizations increased the application performance between 10 and 20 percent after deployment (source: TechValidate).

Stay tuned for more facts on great benefits we bring to the table in future blogs, and how our customers derive significant business advantages from our technology.

Our Policy Based Management (PBM) solution leverages our USP platform, Tiered Storage Manager and our services arm to create a policy-based SLA management solution.  To help pait the picture (albeit a festive picture), SLAs come from Santa, aka “the boss”.  The solution allows administrators (aka the “elves”) to migrate data in a live system and invisibly to the applications.  The software tools also enable both monitoring and intervention to be automated.

Given ‘tis the season, I was wondering whether Santa really cared about Tiered Storage Automation.  The answer is probably yes:  just think of all the transactions he’s got to deal with.  There is a lot of controversy about how many elves there are, and whether they’re storage admins.  I have to admit that I don’t have a credible case study on how we helped Santa with his storage needs! On a more serious note,  you can take a look at this customer success story. It is from 2007, but I picked it because it’s  about a great Swedish customer of ours (so we’re seasonably close to the North Pole!). If if your’re looking to put  tiered storage automation, cost reduction, improved reliability and downtime avoidance  under the tree this year… you know where to go.

All that said, and since we’ve had automation for a while, we’ve been asking ourselves do we (I mean our customers) really need to worry about storage tiers anymore?  Let’s keep the discussion going…

EMC is Late to the Party, Again

There are two important pieces of “FAST”:

1. The ability to move data between high performance expensive storage and slower inexpensive storage
2. The automation of data movement based on policies

EMC first announced that FAST v1 would be available Q4… and now? The latest update from Chuck is that FAST v1 won’t be available until ‘early 2010’.  See Devang’s (aka Storage Nerve) take on this new information here.

Once again, EMC is playing follower. We’ve had many exchanges about this around the theme of replication for example.  In this case, Hitachi introduced Tiered Storage Manager (TSM) to the market in 2005 (it was available in a previous incarnation under the name “Data Migrator”) and has a thousands of customers who have purchased and deployed it.

In 2009, Hitachi introduced Policy Based Management Service (PBM), a service offering to assist customers in implementing policy-based tiered storage automation.

Even when EMC does finally ship FAST, Hitachi’s implementation will still deliver far more value to customers. Why? Because Hitachi’s TSM provides a far wider range of storage options that include heterogeneous arrays from a variety of storage vendors, including EMC. This means customers can utilize existing storage and protect current investments.

Contrast that with EMC’s approach. Announce a totally new architecture requiring a forklift upgrade and promise to ship software to allow you to exploit the system sometime in the future.

Where’s the ROI?
The ROI of automated tiered storage management is that it eliminates the enormous staff overhead associated with moving data. What’s more, while storage admins can identify SLA shortcomings and manually tune storage arrays, they almost never will move data in an array that is over-performing, meaning often data resides on fast storage when it should be moved to less expensive SATA disk. The bottom line is automated tiering makes storage admins more productive and more efficiently utilizes disk space.

The combination of Hitachi technology (platform, TSM and PBM) provide vastly superior ROI when compared to EMC’s FAST and V-Max technology for the following reasons:

1. Hitachi’s offering is available TODAY well tested and proven in the field
2. It supports not only Hitachi storage but virtually every major non-HDS storage array in the market. As a result, Hitachi’s offerings provide the ability to mine value from existing and future assets
3. On a related note, remember that by using High Availability Manager provides the ability to non-disruptively move data between existing arrays and future generations of product.  My point here is that EMC effectively aligns automated tiering with capital investments in new arrays in the form of V-Max. At the same time, EMC’s migration is disruptive (i.e. DMX to V-Max) further limiting customer ROI.  See my previous blog about this.

When it comes to automated tiered storage customers have choices:

You can choose to acquire products that will solve your problems and work with installed assets, TODAY (Hitachi).

Or you can buy more hardware (e.g. V-Max) and wait until EMC ships FAST and hope that it works as promised….sometime in the future.  Personally, I’m in no hurry. And it sounds like EMC isn’t either.

In reality, this isn’t much of a choice, is it?

As some of you know, we happen to have a great platform and an extremely experienced team of migration experts in our global services organization.  We’ve been spending time studying this migration “iceberg” recently.   Many organizations could be going full steam ahead into a painful collision with reality if they don’t apply the right technology and methodologies to migrate their environment.  There are many misconceptions out there and we’ve uncovered a few.

Rather than write about some of the recent findings from a TechValidate customer survey, I’ll point you to an upcoming Hitachi Data Systems WebTech about migration myths that will cover the many themes and misconceptions associated with migration… and highlight best practices.

Unlike “other vendors”, at Hitachi Data Systems we don’t need to give away migration software to make things look better for the customer and obfuscate the reality.  We successfully prove every day without marketing gimmicks that we have the less/non-disruptive technology and services that effectively reduce customer risk as we efficiently migrate their whole environments (see the Wikibon post from Mr. Floyer).

Let me know what you thing of the WebTech next week (it will be archived if you miss it).

Please take this with as light-heartedly as you can — asXIV is really a perfect implementation of ‘storage communism,’ as my colleague often says. His reasoning behind this is that all the customer applications assigned to an XIV are treated equally: hence, the phrase storage communism. The net of this argument is that XIV unfortunately customers have very little flexibility and few options as a system gets loaded up – other than to add another system. Which of course is capitalism given the price points.

In the field we hear that the first thing an XIV sales person does is demonstrate that a double hard drive failure is less probable than the end of the world. This tells you there’s a problem. Let me make it clear: there are no RAID 6 capabilities to protect customers and a double hard drive failure that means bye-bye data. Other possible failures include: a PC failure, or a double drive tray and PC failure, …or single drive failure + single drive tray and PC failure. I am losing track of the permutations. You do the math.

I think it’s also valid to question the XIV’s performance, given that response times are in the 5 millisecond range (yes, five), and limitations when running single threaded workloads. If your apps are in no hurry, then this is the one for you.  In contrast, HDS does a great job with performance, reliability and availability with our Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 product line. We are already delivering enterprise-class features for the midrange.

Also with a maximum usable of 79TB of storage from the XIV, this can become expensive for customers who require more than 79TB or know they’ll outgrow that within a year or two of purchase. Since there are no tiering capabilities, customers would need another system if they grow past 79TB. I know, you must be thinking the same thing — that’s yet another island of storage, and an expensive island at that.

Federated Storage Defined
The folks at Wikibon recently published the following definition of federated storage:

Federated storage is the collection of autonomous storage resources governed by a common management system that provides rules about how data is stored, managed and migrated throughout the storage network. In this definition, storage resources include disk capacity managed by controllers or appliances controlling multiple arrays.

One core requirement implied by this definition is the ability to move application data within this federation without any user disruption whatsoever. The business driver here is that disruptions are very difficult to schedule and require enormous amounts of planning, often as much as six months. You’ll hear more on this topic in a future blog.

Tiered storage addresses this need well today, but it can get even better. While tiering optimizes storage efficiency within an array, when storage must be completely moved to another point of control (e.g. moved to a separate controller or appliance) tiered storage falls short because the move is disruptive to applications (although our technology allows customers to mitigate this significantly, to minutes only in some cases).

How Disruptive is Non-disruptive?
Many vendors will claim they can move data non-disruptively. As a customer you need to carefully read the fine print. For example, IBM’s marketing people will claim you can move data from one SVC to another non-disruptively. The fact is you can do this within an SVC cluster but not across clusters.

EMC is also fond of invoking the term non-disruptive, when really they mean less disruptive. Or in the case of migrations from DMX to V-Max, hugely disruptive– unless you think forklift upgrades are minor events.

The truth is Hitachi Data Systems is the only block-based storage vendor today that can offer federated storage and achieve truly non-disruptive migrations for open systems, even across generations of arrays.

How can Hitachi make this claim?
Hitachi offers High Availability Manager which is a software feature that allows data controlled by one USP V to be replicated/migrated to a completely separate array. Once the migration has been completed, the application can access the new target array with no reliance on the original system. You can decide to “fail over” when you want. One more thing that is actually very important to many customers: we can support asset replacement and retirement of OEM external storage assets without “any” disruption to the customers application.

Please check our video on HDS TV here.

Can EMC do this today? When will EMC be able to deliver truly non-disruptive migrations? Your guess is as good as mine.

As a customer, you have choices:

1. Buy functionalities today that meet your tactical and strategic requirements for federated storage, achieve fast ROI and future-proof investments, or…
2. Buy futures from vendors that have consistently forced you to endure expensive, time consuming and disruptive migrations when there are better options available.

When you think about it in these terms, the choice is pretty obvious.

I was in the UK last week for visits with our EMEA team and to attend Storage Expo.  I used to live in London as a student so it’s always interesting to see how things have changed, or not!   

On the storage front, it was my first time attending Storage Expo and I have to say that the HDS booth looked fantastic, and the UK team did a great job of answering our customers and prospects’questions.  There was a live demonstration or our storage economics tool which generated a lot of interest.  

Also, our CTO Hu Yoshida had a keynote and a breakout session.  Lots of interest here again.   Check out Hu’s blog at http://blogs.hds.com/hu/

I had a chance to chat about a few key topics with our team, partners and customers, so thank you for your time..and hope to see you soon in the US for some of you.

I particularly enjoyed meeting a fellow blogger, Matthew Yeager, with whom I had a great “BS-Free” discussion (it’s a Green technical term, I promise) about customer issues, the role of economics in the choice of a storage architecture, and many other topics.   Matthew writes a fantastic blog so please go check it out:  http://whatsthisgottodowithstorage.wordpress.com/

The InMage technology provides customers with remote replication and application failover in a single, easy to deploy and manage platform that provides comprehensive recovery capabilities for midmarket organizations.

I could go on, but I think Mr Duplessie really captured the essence  of this partnership in his recent blog.

For more details, please see the press release.

Looks like a bad plane ride these days for EMC on the VMax front.    You can turn your cell phone back on but don’t expect to sip champagne if you’re selling VMax for a living.  We’ve been looking for them in the field and like good seats on a plane, they’re scarce… but even discounted, they don’t sell.

How many VMax  are  out there?  Remember how it was code-named “Tigon”, an infertile hybrid cat?   What I’m hearing is really not that many despite many traditional sales techniques to entice customers. 

Interestingly enough, Mr. Burke from EMC avoided the question when I asked him directly on Michael Hay’s blog, essentially confirming that people are just not convinced.  

These are tough times, and customers are very smart and will thoroughly evaluate the economic and technological merits of new storage infrastructure investments.  Saying you’ve got a new system, that’s not compatible with the previous generations, and benchmarking it against your own previous poor performers is just not cutting it anymore, even with the great marketing spin EMC put on VMax.  

So what have you heard?