I recently took the time to chat with Mike Nalls over a Skype link .  In addition to his role on the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) Product Marketing team, Mike also focuses on eco-friendly data center marketing initiatives at HDS.

We discuss the steps that data center managers and storage managers can take to address power and cooling costs for storage systems that have doubled in the past five years.  Mike cites some facts and figures from industry analysts about these costs, which I have referenced here:

IDC

* Fourth annual Green ICT and Sustainability Survey by Vernon Turner, December 2010, IDC #225957,
* The Economic Meltdown and Its Chilling Effect on the Cost to Power, Cool, and Manage Enterprise Storage by David

Reinsel, IDC #217158, March 2009

* The Economic Meltdown and Its Chilling Effect on the Cost to Power, Cool, and Manage Enterprise Storage by David Reinsel, IDC #217158, March 2009
Wikibon
* SAS Drives Tier 1 to New Levels of Green (http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/SAS_Drives_Tier_1_to_New_Levels_of_Green)

Good viewing, and please let me know what you think about the format!

I recently took the time to chat with Mike Nalls over a Skype link.  In addition to his role on the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) Product Marketing team, Mike also focuses on eco-friendly data center marketing initiatives at HDS.

We discuss the steps that data center managers and storage managers can take to address power and cooling costs for storage systems that have doubled in the past five years.  Mike cites some facts and figures from industry analysts about these costs, which I have referenced below.

Good viewing, and please let me know what you think about the format!

IDC

• Fourth annual Green ICT and Sustainability Survey by Vernon Turner, December 2010, IDC #225957,
• The Economic Meltdown and Its Chilling Effect on the Cost to Power, Cool, and Manage Enterprise Storage by David Reinsel, IDC #217158, March 2009
• The Economic Meltdown and Its Chilling Effect on the Cost to Power, Cool, and Manage Enterprise Storage by David Reinsel, IDC #217158, March 2009

Wikibon

So you’d think that everyone would be on an equal footing by essentially supporting an API.  And it’s actually true — the playing field is leveled for hardware storage vendors. Now it is up to the storage vendor to demonstrate its true capability and innovation in order to leverage this type of integration. What makes the difference is the platform that you combine with your VMware environment.

For more details, please read this blog post from Michael Heffernan.

Because of its architecture, Hitachi VSP is a perfect match for VMware environments, and allows customers to fully benefit from its advanced features like storage virtualization, or attaching external storage…even non-HDS storage.  We extend our capabilities, including VAAI support for all 3 x primitives, to platforms that are not certified.

But please beware of inaccurate marketing and technical information that you may read here and there.  This integration is done at our microcode level and is extremely efficient… and a proven approach.

Specifically:

VAAI’s “write same” implementation on our Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) thin provisioned volume delivers an “eargerzeroedthick” formatted VMDK as a Thin. What does this mean? 1) The vSphere Admin can just create all VMDK’s in this preferred format as default and not have to worry about using up disk space. 2) It performs 85% faster on this HDP compared to a non-VAAI enabled platform. 3) It substantially reduces the load on both the host and the array.

HDP enables the creation of wide striped large datastores (up to 60 TB), which can dynamically grow with a few mouse clicks (good luck trying that on a VMAX)

Contrary to false competitive claims, VSP 3D capabilities enable the full extension of the system attributes to an externally virtualized platform without limiting the system configuration to a cache write-through mode only; rumors that VSP cache need to be set in write-through mode for data consistency are inaccurate.

VSP has several capabilities that support workload balancing within a virtualized storage architecture such as:

• Wide striping
• I/O throttling (Server Priority Manager),
• Resource Group (partitioning), which includes the ability to segment the cache orsetup cache in write-through mode,
• Hitachi Dynamic Tiering, which optimizes data placement based on access frequency and capacity tier speed

The reality is that for customers who own legacy storage systems that do not support VAAI today and have no upgrade path, VSP offers a much greater value than a force forklift upgrade to a new platform.

I hope this sets the record straight! But stay tuned to #HDSday on Twitter, as Michael “Heff” Heffernan will be talking more about it during this week’s Blogger Day.

EMC used to be really good at product transitions.  I say this with a lot of respect.  But for whatever reason, things have changed.   They’ve lost their “Mojo”.

It’s much like a recent candidate for Governor here in California who thought that a lot of (marketing) money could get you there.  Well, the other guy spent a fraction and got the job.  He was a better product for his audience, had a message that resonated, etc.   We’ll see in time if the goods are delivered, but since it is politics, anything goes!

Today’s announcement by EMC was an interesting example of form over substance.   It was a show, but it begged more questions than it provided answers.  It was entertainment, just like a circus show with all the characters.  They even had little Billy provisioning a storage device from his iPad.  It must have cost a lot of money.

But seriously, it was updates and catch up, and a much-hyped relaunch of a low end product that seems to be missing the mark based on some early blog reviews.

Why make it simple when you can make it complex?

Over 40 products or solutions were discussed, but nothing really ground-breaking or that had not already been covered (leaked?) in the media recently.   You’d think EMC would want to consolidate their portfolio as customers have been expecting.  Make it simple.  With so many products and solutions, one could easily get lost on the journey to the private cloud.  And this complexity can only add operational costs.   Also, there seemed to be a certain avoidance of discussing the high end of the market where VMAX is positioned.   See why below.

Tough product transition

Back to my point, it’s marketing and it was a marketing show.  Looking back 18 months, what is frankly astonishing to me is that EMC’s transition from DMX to VMAX was poor.  Seriously, you can talk about chip sets until you’re blue in the face but this is just obfuscating the reality.  Let me start with 3 items:

1)  False Claims: VMAX was clearly not ready when announced and released. While this happens often in technology, claiming first to market when you make an announcement 18 months before you push it out is not being first to market.  FAST was SLOW.

2) Performance: The product’s architecture was a bit of a gamble:  it was a design predicated on scale out.   In essence, if you can’t scale up, it’s hard to truly benefit from scale out.   So…customers keep using DMX (an older scale up architecture).  Of course, why wouldn’t they?  I hope the transition to the next generation DMX will be non-disruptive if EMC decides to back away from VMAX.    The problem with today’s performance announcement is this:  asserting is not proving.  In the field, we’re hearing that the product has serious performance issues.  No one is buying that this is really being addressed.   In his blog yesterday, Chris Evans provides a good piece of advice:

The performance and efficiency claims should be challenged by customers at every opportunity as only customer pressure will make EMC change their policy.

3) Value: As my esteemed colleague says:   “If customers brought VMAX based on EMC’s support promises, they may only be able to recoup a year worth of usage before their VMAX technology must be refreshed due to its financial EOL (3 years).   You can’t run your infrastructure on a vision.”

There are many other dimensions to yesterday’s announcements that will be covered by other bloggers and industry commentators in the next few days.   My fundamental question is this:   If you take away Evil Knievel, the puppies and the kids, the clown car act, the car sales guys….when the show is over, what are you left with?   What’s really new?  What have they just announced that’s not some form of repackaging?

Adam, can you give us a little background on this offering?

Adam: Yes, thanks Christophe.  Hitachi Dynamic Replicator (HDR) is an application-aware replication product that allows us to meet a broad spectrum of capabilities for virtual and physical heterogeneous environments.  HDR provides capabilities such as continuous data protection (CDP), remote office (ROBO) protection, application push-button recovery, and more and is perfect for midsized and enterprise environments.

What are the big trends you’ve observed recently?

Adam: Great question. Customers increasingly are looking for ways to reduce costs and risks associated with protecting their data; especially for their applications.  They also are still struggling with meeting backup and recovery windows while their data grows 50%+ annually.  HDR solves these and many other challenges by providing data recovery of individual files or emails, making recovery easier for end users; lowering costs; providing instant and push-button recovery when an application goes down to reduce risk; and allowing customers to meet their backup windows and slow data growth by only replicating changed data. This also helps network utilization rates remain low.

Adam, so what’s new with this release?

Adam:  Overall, Hitachi Dynamic Replicator v5.5 is an easier-to-use product with deeper application integrated recovery wizards, monitoring and reporting capabilities.  It offers our customers more data protection options above and beyond an already robust feature set.  For example, they now havethe ability to take advantage of Exchange and SharePoint single item recovery and other application-aware capabilities.  In addition, sparse retention allows more effective use of storage and recovery option and the ability to retain spective CDP points in time.

Beyond the new features, we’ve updated the pricing model to be specifically aligned with our AMS modular storage array.

What are customers saying about HDR?

Adam: From what I’ve seen, customers can’t get enough of this product.  They are thrilled with the way it has reduced the costs associated with recovering their critical data such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle.  They are also using it to help migrate to newer storage platforms as they upgrade their data centers and the migrations are quicker and easier.

Where can people get more info?

Adam: more information can be found here and a demo can be found here.

Our prospects and customers heard our vision, learned more about our new products, met their peers and shared their experience.  I was very honored to support and present at the Bogota and Paris forums in the respective local languages.

I thought I’d share a few thoughts and anecdotes in this post.

First of all, kudos to the teams who tirelessly worked on making these happen.  If you attended one of these events, you probably saw the attention to detail and the dedication of the teams.  Take a look at the photos from Paris and Bogota on our Facebook page.

Our customers say it best:  we had customer testimonials at most of the forums and they shared their experience of Hitachi Data Systems.  Not just the products, but also the people and their customer focus.  It goes back to the culture of Hitachi:  impeccable technology, a true customer focus, a long term view of the relationship.

There were a couple of funny anecdotes that some of our keynote customers shared.  One that I really liked was about how reliable Hitachi Data Systems is as a company and a team.  This is a French customer who has had a lot of long-term experiences with many vendors:

“Normally with storage vendors [edited to spare the “innocent”] after you sign the PO, the first thing you do is call your legal department.  I never had to do this with Hitachi (Data Systems).  Not once. “

Bogota was a great event as well, and given the recent win of the SF Giants a few days before, I had to spend time talking about the play of World Series MVP Edgar Renteria’s (he’s from Colombia).  But what we talked about was also how an event like a World Series game can generate some much data creation and consumption.  Photos, texts, videos, memorabilia sales etc.   Data really drives our world, even baseball.

And last but not least:  Our vision resonates.  In many languages!

Customers commented on how we are “getting it” and how the critical changes in the creation and consumption of data today require a transformation of their technology and processes in the data center.

It was a real pleasure being involved with the success of our Hitachi Information Forums and look forward to keeping the conversations going with our customers – including here on this blog.  If you attended, what was most valuable for you?  How could we improve for future events of this kind?

Enter the Hitachi Command Director software, through which we address this challenge by streamlining the process of establishing, monitoring, and troubleshooting storage service levels by business application.  By consolidating the service level reporting across the Hitachi Command Suite of management products, key storage performance indicators by business application can be properly monitored to ensure service levels are being met while facilitating the movement of an application workload to its proper storage tier for policy based storage management.

I recently sat down with one of our product marketing managers, Richard Jew, to talk about some of the functionality the Command Director provides and how it’s being used. Here’s a snapshot of our conversation…

What are some of the key features you think set us apart from the competition with this software?

Richard: The Command Director’s greatest strength is making administrators more agile — agile to changing business needs and aligning the proper storage assets to support those needs. Admins use Command Director to assess and map out the use of shared storage resources and correlate them to the most mission-critical apps quickly.

Command Director gives customers a level of intelligence by analyzing application capacity and performance utilization based on historical trends to help with future planning and infrastructure expansion.  This will be really critical for companies as they set parameters for their storage needs in 2011 and beyond.

There’s also a pretty cool dashboard that graphically depicts and monitors business applications in near real-time with their respective storage service levels, storage system health, and any service level alerts.

What about management and SLAs?

Richard:  Definitely. Command Director defines and monitors storage service level objectives application by application to make sure requirements are met and to look ahead for any potential issues that could lead to an application service level violation before it even occurs.  Command Director has been built with policy-based storage management in mind to shift applications to a higher performing storage tier if their SLAs aren’t being met properly.

This real-time monitoring also helps customers analyze their service level trends to gain new insights into how storage can be better utilized and optimized to provide a higher return on their application infrastructure.

How does Command Director tie into the Command Suite?

Richard: Command Director fits hand in glove with the Command Suite of products and offers centralized management and a business-oriented application view of Hitachi data infrastructures.  You can consolidate storage configuration, tier, capacity and performance stats from across the Command Suite to establish service level objectives by business application, leveraging Command Director.

These are just a few of the features we really like about the new Command Director. Have you tried it? For more information, click here, and let us know what you think!

In the booth, we had the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) on display, which drew a big crowd and a lot of buzz.  I had a fun time discussing its advantages over other vendors.  Can’t resist!

But our Hitachi VSP had some competition.  If there had been a prize for the best giveaway at the expo, I am very confident we would have won.  We even had competitors stopping by to get one of these:

I am not sure as to why these were so “hot”… but they allowed us to strike up many discussions with customers and prospects alike.

Key considerations for cloud storage

Their outsourcing service offerings are for organizations that want an enterprise-level environment for their applications, and access to an experienced technical team.  I am stressing enterprise-level because it’s a pretty important point to remember for anyone who’s seriously considering buying cloud storage today.

Jeffrey did a great job of cutting through the marketing of many providers to establish a few sobering and refreshing key points:

• Traditional clouds targeting consumers completely miss the mark
• By design, clouds can’t meet enterprise business requirements for performance, security, uptime, compliance, transparency, etc
• Cloud service SLAs are “best effort”, devoid of storage guarantees
• Cloud computing is expensive — easily 3x or more the cost of dedicated managed hosting
• Clouds are designed to be accessible, not be high performance

There is a need for something else — call it an “enterprise cloud” that combines components of enterprise-class hardware to ensure meaningful SLAs, 100% uptime guarantees including maintenance windows, security and business continuity and disaster recovery.    In addition, safe Multi-tenancy, within or between companies, is a convergence requirement for efficient usage and cost tracking (charge-back).

On the subject of convergence, Jeffrey then went down the stack and provided his perspective on key trends around servers, networks and of course storage.  I personally really like his take on storage which I will close this post with:

“Managing data will become more important than storing data, as metadata trumps the value of the data itself”

And… “Intelligent Object Stores are the future to scaling ‘usable’ storage”.

In the weeks and months preceding the recent launch of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), we received consistently positive feedback from analysts, industry experts and customers on our efficiency-based design, in particular our advances in power and cooling.   It’s not just hype or “feel good” marketing; sustainability is a Tier 1 requirement.  But not every player is equal.

In fact, the adoption of SAS drives is changing the game and in an interesting article, David Floyer from Wikibon provides a very good comparison of storage systems one would normally consider for Tier 1 in the data center.  Also, the ability to combine multiple types of drives with dynamic tiering allows customers to derive significant “green” and economic benefits.

Please take a look at this summary chart:

Figure 1 – Comparison of Tier 1 Power & Space Costs over 3 years for a Performance Configuration (600GB drives, SAS where available)
Source Wikibon 2010
I think the results say it all…the Hitachi VSP was designed for efficiency at all levels, providing significant advantages in power consumption reductions and density, which is important given the Hitachi VSP packs more capacity per square foot or square meter than competitors.

Based upon the title, you may have been expecting this post to be about national or California politics. It’s tempting, but rather, I’d like to focus on something positive –the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). In particular, I want to cover some important sustainability aspects of our newest platform.

It’s about keeping your cool really.  It is well-known that keeping IT equipment at the optimal temperature is an energy-intensive proposition, as it easily can make up 50 percent of a data center’s total energy consumption. And by the way, up to 40 percent of that total energy usage is devoured by data storage.

From the early design phases, the Hitachi VSP was designed for efficiency at all levels. For example, our choice of SAS drives and backend interface (for which our competitors are playing catch-up) are innovations that provide significant advantages in power consumption reductions, as well as in density with the 2.5-inch form factor. Density is also an important aspect to consider because data center space always comes at a price, and the Hitachi VSP can pack more capacity per square foot or square meter than its competitors.

Combine that with the amount of business-critical data that continues to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52 percent, and you quickly realize you just can’t afford systems that:

• Do not have green on their bezel
• Can also be used as warehouse heating units (I am thinking of a roman numeral right now)
• Are not “dense” enough, i.e. end up costing a lot more to operate (power consumption, floor space, lack of dynamic tiering) for large capacities. Just look at the physical spec sheets for a V-Max, for example.

In a nutshell, here’s what we have in the Hitachi VSP — when “S” means “Sustainability”:

• Internal and external storage management
• Automated dynamic tiering
• Front-to-back cooling airflow
• Low power, small form factor disk drives
• High-density packaging
• Low power memory
• Flash-protected cache
• …and it’s Super Eco-product certified

The benefits of efficiency and sustainability by design are very visible, and very tangible:

• More storage efficiency per square foot or square meter with high-density architecture
• Lower power consumption per floor space and per capacity utilized
• More workload efficiency with 3D scaling, automated dynamic tiering, higher IOPS per square foot and end-to-end virtualization
• Greater granularity to ensure that data is in the right place on the right type of storage

For more details, please take a look at this white paper:

http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/hitachi-white-paper-strategies-for-greater-sustainability-in-data-center.pdf

For more details on the VSP:

http://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-virtual-storage-platform.html?WT.ac=us_inside_sp1r1&_p=v

Isn’t this a better topic than politics?

What’s in code name?† Victoria represented victory, fluidity of the infrastructure (Lake Victoria), leadership and longevity (Queen Victoria)Öand it was a secret. ††

On Monday, Hitachi Data Systems introduced two game-changing products: the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and the Hitachi Command Suite (v7.0). It’s been a lot of work for a large team of people at HDS around the world and for our colleagues in Japan. It culminated in a fantastic launch event that kicks off a series of Hitachi Information Forums…yet it’s only the beginning.

Our code name for this launch was Victoria. One blogger wondered about the choice of the code name. Roberto Basilio (VP of product management for enterprise storage platforms) and I came up with it, so I will officially confirm it is not an ex-girlfriend!

What’s in code name? Victoria represented victory, fluidity of the infrastructure (Lake Victoria), leadership and longevity (Queen Victoria)…and it was a secret.

Victory: This launch changes the game. Our competitors already are feeling like they’ve just had a close encounter with NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott (he was at the event too). Think of getting hit by a freight train…something like that. You won’t win this one.

Fluidity: We’re introducing dynamic tiering — a way to make the storage infrastructure more fluid and agile. No other enterprise system offers this today. As Roberto says, “we’re faster and fastest!”

Leadership and Longevity: We literally beat our own (traditional) drums with Japanese drummers and celebrated Hitachi, Ltd.’s 100th anniversary by unveiling our new hardware and software platforms.

A Secret?: Not anymore! It’s the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and it scales in 3D — up, out and deep. No one else does it this way and this creates a unique affinity with highly virtualized server environments.

What’s more significant and what transcends the product announcements is how we unveiled a new HDS — a team that leverages strong corporate values and innovation to change the game in the storage business. There’s a great posting from Mark Peters from ESG about this.

At Monday’s launch event in Santa Clara our customers were present in force both in the audience, on stage and online. Many interviews also took place at the event — check out the Wikibon Cube videos hosted by SiliconANGLE. We had industry bloggers including Rick Vanover, Chris Evans, and Devang Panchigar.

And I’d like to give a big thanks to our partners as well for their presence. They were with us on stage, supporting our team, being part of the team: Brocade, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and VMware. Also supporting this first edition of the forum in our pavilion were ACS, FalconStor, Fusion Storm, Integrated Archive Systems and Silver Peak.

The event closed with Ronnie Lott — a perfect conclusion to this event…but I won’t say what he got our CTO to do!

So here’s a simple message for our competitors: Game on!

You can find more information about our announcements here and blog postings from Hu, Claus, Michael, David, Ken and Heidi.

Many other industry bloggers have also posted comments and perspectives, and a few links are listed below: StorageNerve, RupturedMonkey, The Storage Architect, iKnerd and Technical Deep Dive.