Claus's Blog

So here in the U.S. we’re on the eve of one of our largest holidays: Thanksgiving. Most countries have a form of this holiday, on different dates, so it’s not uniquely a United States concept and we probably copied it from somewhere else. But it is cleverly timed, in that it’s always on a Thursday, meaning that most businesses (except retail!) don’t bother to open on Friday as well giving us all essentially a 4-day weekend! It’s a good time for parades, and watching football on TV while overindulging on food and drink.

The clever timing is that this 4-day weekend launches an unrivaled shopping frenzy that lasts for almost a month and generates essentially 99.999% of the retail shopping revenue for the entire year in the US (did I exaggerate?). But it’s now time to shop, shop, and shop to get ready for the gift-giving holiday of your choice.

So I’ve been thinking what to buy whom, and oftentimes we like to buy gifts that we would ourselves like, meaning I’m thinking storage! Seriously, who wouldn’t want a few more terabytes for themselves? But the problem with any purchase is “for a little bit more” you can have this feature and that feature. This is certainly this is true for electronics and appliances, but also for cars, homes, vacations, etc. I was even in a bookstore this week, and “for only a few dollars more” you could get a CD of the author. Nice gift. So what does this have to do with modular storage? No, I’m not buying an AMS2500 for anyone, including me (although I’d LOVE one in case someone wants to take up a donation). But this is “feature creep” and we all face those decisions.

Not that many years ago there was a major gap between modular (midrange) storage and the enterprise stuff. At Hitachi (and EMC and IBM and…), we even had separate development organizations for these separate products (no longer). There was no danger of “feature creep” driving you up the food chain and you either had to choose between a fairly basic midrange RAID box with little function, or jumping into the enterprise class arena. It was like having to choose between a golf cart and a BMW for transportation (what if it snows?) with no options in between.

That’s no longer true for storage, which is good for the consumer and customer, and many of the features historically available only on enterprise storage are now doing a “reverse feature creep” to the midrange space.

I’ve recently been involved in a number of conversations with customers over this dilemma since it’s not as “crisp” as it used to be. Wanna play golf? Buy a golf cart. Much of the conversation revolves around the feature/function available on each platform, the performance requirement, and the “scale up” vs. “scale out” capability. Oh yes, and cost!! I’ve thought about developing a “decision chart” to help folks decide, but there are too many “apples and oranges” comparisons to make that useful, and in the end it oftentimes comes down to price. But there are some features now available on modular/midrange that are getting enough attention that the decisions are becoming easier to make.

Speaking only of the HDS AMS2xxx line, what customers seem to be gravitating to are things like:

• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) that not only provides thin provisioning, but performance and ease of provisioning. That’s a big one.
• “Dense trays” - providing not only an intermix of SAS and SATA drives, but with reduced power consumption.
• Active/active architecture providing dynamic workload balancing as well as failover.
• Cache partitioning – this provides dramatically greater “scale up” capability since workloads can be partitioned.
• Full suite of replication products including synchronous and asynchronous disaster recovery capability and cloning.
• Sizzling performance with 32 concurrent I/Os and 900,000 IOPS and almost 10GB in bandwidth (9.6GB to be precise)
• Non-disruptive microcode upgrades
• And if you also have the USP-V enterprise class storage, single management and commands.
• And much more…

If I had looked at this list a few years ago, I would have assumed this was describing enterprise-class storage, not midrange/modular storage. Midrange/modular has grown up and although the gap between the two platforms won’t close, it is interesting to see the “reverse feature creep” take place. I think this is a trend that will continue and it is a very good trend. Oh yes, and they’re less expensive.  Midrange/modular development has become very aggressive of late, certainly for Hitachi.

And now back to some overindulgence of food and drink and figuring out who in my family could use some storage…