After a relaxing break for the holidays, Storage Visions 2012 was a great way to ease back into the swing of things. Sure, many people might not look at a whirlwind trip to a Las Vegas-based conference kicking off CES (the world’s largest consumer technology show of the year) “easing back in,” but well…I do.

SV2012 starts a few days before CES, so there is somewhat of a quiet before the storm. I love the feel of Storage Visions; it has an intimate feel even though the attendance continues to grow each year. This is due to Tom Coughlin and his team. They run the conference like a community. I see many familiar faces each year and there is a heavy emphasis on networking with your peers. Networking is made easy with the laid back atmosphere at the conference, and with all the friendly exchanges, it is very easy to meet new contacts and get excited about what you do. Our HDS cloud vision really seemed to resonate with the people I talked with.

I was able to present during the session “They’re Out There: Opportunities and Challenges for Consumer and Enterprise Cloud Storage”. What a fun panel session it was. It included a variety of presenters (even a competitor), but it was such a lively interactive exchange that it made for an interesting and informative discussion. The session focused on distributing content, as well as how on-line back-up and disaster recovery are driving demand for remote storage. We also addressed storage requirements and trends for online content delivery and remote storage. We covered some new business opportunities and how they’ll impact the growth and use of storage in this growing market.

Another thing that made SV 2012 a bigger and better event this year, for me and HDS: Hitachi Content Platform (HCP)was honored with a Visionary Product Award at the 2012. HDS was recognized in the Enabling Professional Storage Technology category for the benefits HCP brings to organizations, including simplified IT, reduced costs and reduced risks. I swear I thought I was accepting an Oscar! A little too excited maybe? Oh well, a little too much excitement won’t kill anyone.

That’s how I started off my New Year . I know it will be an exciting year here at HDS. I look forward to spreading the HDS cloud vision and continuing to share the many exciting things we have going on!

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For me, those conversations usually include discussing and recommending favorite books as a way to share what’s been useful for us. Since recommendations from people with similar interests are usually more helpful, below are my book recommendations from 2011—not all are new–for those that want to be a geek but really aren’t. (You know who you are…or you know who those people in your life are. We might love the idea of fractals and quantum mechanics…but we can’t do math in our heads.)

Title: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Author: James Gleick (@JamesGleick)

About: A historical perspective of information.

Why read it?

It’s a beautifully written study of information as its own historical topic, which I haven’t seen anyone else do.

Gleick does a wonderful job explaining some very difficult concepts and I love the history of great discoveries, Even more impressive are the implications when his historical evaluation is taken in its entirety. I believe it reveals future trends that will impact how we relate to information in the near and long term. Although I found the first few chapters to be a little slow, I’ve actually read it twice and may read it a third time…it’s that good.

Title: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

About: How the unpredictable is really unpredictable and how to deal with that. 

Why read it?

We should all be skeptical of models and people that “predict” what will happen, but we also need to plan for success and different possibilities. Taleb does a great job of explaining why the improbable usually has a lot more impact on our lives and businesses than what we planned for, and gives some advice on how to deal with that. (Also, the summary of fractals and self-similar replication at the end was really helpful for this geek wannabe.)

Title: World 3.0

Author: Pankaj Ghemawat (@PankajGhemawat)

About:  How distances and borders still heavily influence our lives, businesses and economics in general.

Why read it?

This should have been called “the world is NOT flat” as it’s really a counterpoint to the book The World is Flat and for that reason alone I think it’s a must read. So many people either blindly favor both globalization and deregulation—or oppose both of them. Ghemawat offers what I think is a more balanced option where these are not linked, binary choices. It’s worth picking this up just to understand an alternative way of looking at globalization.

Title: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Author: Tim Wu (@Superwuster)

About: Ebb and flow of decentralization and monolithic centralization of power in the information industry.

Why read it?

It’s a fascinating and entertaining review of the rise (and stumbling and rising) of major 20th century information powerhouses from the telegraph and telephone to Apple and the Internet. Regardless of whether you agree with Wu’s recommendations at the end, it’s worthwhile for those of us in IT to understand this history and evaluate how the cycle of decentralization and centralization might apply to our industry.

Title: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Author: Ray Kurzweil (@raykurzweil2035)

About: Enhanced human cognition and existence taken to a logical extreme.

Why read it?

Hmm. I almost didn’t include this one because Kurzweil gets pretty far out there on his ideas. However, it’s extremely interesting to consider technology as another phase in evolution and it might be valuable to ponder what that implies. I recommend it for those particularly interested in sci-fi and anyone that wants to get out of the box of their own thinking. This book was published around 2005, so you’ll notice some predictions that haven’t come true yet but if you can get past that it’s quite thought provoking.

So these are a few of my favorite reads that I managed to squeeze into 2011. What are your book recommendations?

With this newest release of HDI (see the press release), coupled with the power of the Hitachi Content Platform, we are arming customers with the necessary technology to free their information and take a step into the Content Cloud. As we outlined before, the key capabilities of the Content Cloud include information mobility and intelligence - putting the right data in the right place, at the right time, whilst empowering user control. This new version of HDI supports this vision in several ways.

First, HDI v3.0 includes technology that permits dynamic dispersion and sharing of data. Based on chosen policies, information written into one HDI (via standard NFS or CIFS) can automatically and transparently become available at multiple remote HDI instances. Imagine, for instance, wanting to distribute the new 20MB corporate presentation to each of many regional offices. Instead of emailing it (propagating hundreds if not thousands of copies - yuck) or putting it on SharePoint (slow downloads), you can instead drop it onto the “corporate drive”. This action will cause the other inter-connected HDIs to “see” that new content is available, and based on access it will be cached close to the users who want to get the new presentation (much faster, simple and seamless).

Next, HDI places control at the fingertips of users. Because by design and construction, a cloud built with HCP and HDI is backup free, placing tools in the hands of users to manage their own data is imperative. HCP already affords many controls for managing where data is stored, replicated, versioned, retained, and disposed. Now HDI passes this richness directly onto users via self directed recovery of prior stored versions or recovery of deleted content. Unlike other NAS technologies, HDI natively couples with the power of object-based management affording unparalleled granular access and control.

Finally, HDI includes some clever technology that helps customers adopt cloud in a very seamless fashion. By directly managing the transition of data non-disruptively from legacy NAS devices into the cloud-attached HDI, making the transition to cloud-based storage has never been easier. During the transition, all data remains available and once the transition completes, the richness of the Hitachi solution becomes fully available - bottom-less, backup-free file sharing that looks “legacy” NFS or CIFS to users and applications, but with the power of cloud underneath.

Take a look at the products in more detail for HDI and for HCP.

During a panel discussion, two of our customers commented how the use of cloud solutions was influencing their organizational structure—in short, that the higher level segmentations of server, storage and network groups were merging.  I know many folks had postulated that this would happen, but this is the first time I’ve heard customers from different industries talking about how it impacts business structure. Imagine what that might mean in the long term for business processes. This alone is an interesting topic, and I’d love to hear more real-life examples.

With the idea of unintended consequences of cloud still stuck in my head, I attended Super Computing 2011 last week, which Ken Wood summarized our participation in A Brief Visit to SC’11. This is a fascinating conference if you’re interested in the amazing things being done to turn data into meaningful information, and seeing the impressive projects from the likes of NASA, NOAA and educational institutions. For a non-promotional report on why this conference and supercomputing is important to our industry and society, check out this video summary from EE Times.

Amongst all the super charged brainpower, I heard one of the providers of High Performance Computing (HPC) mention that the concepts of cloud were changing what their end users wanted. I started asking the same question to others and it turns out that because this type of computing and analytics is extremely dependent on node to node fidelity and intolerant of failures, HPC providers had not anticipated a strong interest in cloud services.  However that’s exactly what they are starting to see.

The providers that I spoke to weren’t precisely sure how they would meet these growing requests for cloud-like hosting and delivery but they are working on it.  Super computing as a service (would that be SC-a-a-S?) would require some unique implementations of cloud solutions that would vary greatly from big data solutions due to dissimilar data and analytics models.  Is there enough of a market for SCaaS?  Hmm. Maybe or maybe we’ll call it something else?

These last two weeks have been ones of idea exploration for me, and I’m left with many more questions than I can answer.  However, if you’ve read my other posts, you know I love this process.  (Something good usually comes out of this exploration; I just can’t predict what it will be.)

So, please send me a quick note or write a comment about any unintended consequence of cloud that you’ve experienced or heard about.  I’ll collect them, post a summary, and maybe we’ll collectively come to a few “ah-ha!” moments.

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Having seen the cloud strategy develop from within HDS, and the significant debate over even minor implications, I can attest to how serious we are about using this vision as a lens to organize, prioritize and drive our business.  To help you understand how we are using this for our “bigger picture” I wanted to give you a little insight into some of our brainstorming as to what this vision might make possible today and in the future. And if you’re like me, there’s nothing better than an example to really illustrate the potential of an idea.

So let’s imagine what we could do with better insight using the concepts of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud.  Regardless of the industry, there are amazing accomplishments that can be made, but I’d like to use a healthcare example since we all can relate to having received care (or at least knowing someone that has received care).

In considering how the infrastructure cloud might be used in a healthcare example:  Let’s say that a doctor notices a suspicious illness pattern on rounds. In this case, the doctor could immediately spin up an internal SharePoint for hospital collaboration and an external message board requesting input.  No, this is not rocket science and yes, we can do this today. However without the dynamic resources of an infrastructure cloud, the doctor would have to submit his request and then wait a considerable amount of time for the approval, acquisition and implementation of resources to support the service he needs.  This would delay his ability to collaborate and reach out for assistance, and consequently lose valuable time in detecting a possible outbreak.

If we now look at the next stage of activities for this use case, we can see how a content cloud, built on top of the infrastructure cloud, would help the doctor obtain the data he needs quickly and securely.  For example, the doctor would likely want to search and share information among hospitals with appropriate rights and privacy protection in place while collecting content independent of the application it was created in. In this case, each patient report has a meta-tag for the mystery illness with pertinent information and privacy protection.   The doctor can quickly search across multiple IT systems and find the appropriate information he can then use for other study.  Without the fluid content that the content cloud enables, the doctor might be delayed in aggregating data, or even worse, completely miss information essential to understanding this developing situation.

In this example, we know that the doctor is ultimately trying to save lives and possibly contain an outbreak.  The information cloud can best enable this when layered on top of an infrastructure cloud and content cloud.  For instance, the doctor may identify a possible outbreak in a nearby city using a report that recombines medical analytic data with Google search trends. With this information, the doctor would notify city officials, who would then take preventative action to limit risk. At the same time, based on preset variables the information might also self-direct further search and analysis. For illustration, let’s say the results of this self-direction alerts the doctor of a potential historical match to these trends and this leads him to consider applying an old inoculation solution in a new way.  Applying this insight, he would be able to quickly head off the outbreak. Without the sophisticated insight the information cloud facilitates, the doctor might spend countless hours pouring over data and information: unable to sift out trends and patterns and unable to even consume other sources of information such as machine generated information…let alone be able to blend and analyze everything.  This could mean serious delay in not only identifying but also resolving the health risk.

(Is it me or does all this talk of “the doctor” and future capabilities have you thinking about the “Doctor Who” BBC series?  If you’re among us oddball science fiction fans, I’d love to hear who your favorite “Doctor” is.  One of my favorites is number 9, who you can see in this great promotional picture.)

It’s entertaining to consider vision concepts and build on the possibilities, but it also brings to light novel ideas, uses and even unforeseen challenges.

So what other possibilities and use cases can you dream up for our strategy for infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud?

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First, we announced and provided details behind our vision of where cloud is headed: from infrastructure towards content and then information cloud.

Second, we announced the availability of new Hitachi Cloud Services that customers can leverage to reduce the TCO of unstructured data in their environment while putting themselves on the path to content cloud.

Let me explain a little about these two parts of our announcement.

The first part is giving further insight into what is driving our development, acquisitions, and delivery around cloud services.  The graphic below shows at a high level what we are describing:

We view the infrastructure cloud as a basic set of capabilities that allow us to solve bigger problems—the infrastructure cloud is a set of tools in a toolbox.  In the content cloud, we focus on leveraging the dynamic infrastructure enabled by the infrastructure cloud and add capabilities to liberate data so that it can be freely used and re-used: it enables fluid content.  We have a great example of this in practice with our customer Klinikum Wels (you can see the case study here).  Finally, this leads to the information cloud, where we can leverage the dynamic infrastructure cloud and the liberated data in all forms (structured, unstructured, semi-structured) from the content cloud to drive towards sophisticated analysis and insight.

The second part of the announcement focuses on new Hitachi Cloud Services that are now available and help customers build towards the content cloud while realizing immediate benefits in the infrastructure cloud.

These solutions are focused on TCO reduction for unstructured data, and are delivered with self-service and pay-per-use capabilities.  Here you can continue with already-deployed traditional NAS and complement it with a cloud solution for 30% or more TCO reduction (file tiering); augment or replace NAS filers with a backup-free, bottom-less cloud implementation that still “looks and feels” like traditional NAS but is deployed with next-generation cloud technology; and complement SharePoint environments by offloading a bulk of content into the private cloud.

Because customer choice is extremely important, we have designed all of these new solutions to be modularly delivered: customers can purchase these offering as cloud packages and build their own cloud around it.  They can optionally enable self-service and billing/chargeback by electing to deploy the management portal.  Or we can provide fully managed solutions including a true OpEx pay-per-use consumption model with no upfront capital expense to the customer.

Regardless of deployment choice, these solutions put the customer on the path towards content and information cloud.  Customers get common, policy-driven data lifecycle management; search and retrieval of their data any time, from anywhere; and a foundation to provide data abstraction from the application that generated the data.  Information is the lifeblood of any organization, and we are helping deliver that value to our customers.

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We create, collect and store an immense amount of data and information at an exponential rate.

IDC research has shown that in 2009 there were 800 exabytesof data (that’s 800 million terabytes), by 2020, they forecast this number to be over 35,000.  It’s hard for me to wrap my head around such a large number, but “Data, data everywhere”, an article published last year by The Economist, put the scale and magnitude of this increase in perspective.  The piece noted that Wal-Mart “handles more than one million customer transactions every hour, feeding databases more than an estimated2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress.”

Do we really need all this data?

Well, I think we do.  (A separate post on Information Overload is sure to follow if we can think of something new to add and thereby add to the noise…er… I mean information.)

First off, I’m in awe of the totally cool and amazing things people are doing with information that was once not even a consideration. In a recent article on Feedback Loops, Wired magazine reported some fascinating work done by Shwetak Patel, who translated “the cacophony of electromagnetic interference into the symphony of signals given off by specific appliances and devices and lights.” Through a single device in a single outlet and a stack of algorithms, he could tell if someone left the blender on, and thereby possibly get assistance where needed.   Who would have thought that your house has such unique and useful electronic fingerprints?

And then even the most seemingly useless information—such as Twitter status updates on anything and everything and nothing—is proving to be valuable. Last year researchers at Indiana University and the University of Manchester submitted a paper that claimed and illustrated at a high level that the, “moods expressed in Twitter feeds can accurately predict some changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average three or four days before they occur”. If this seems far-fetched, well I’ll have you know that the Library of Congress is now saving your tweets. Yes, our tweets are now part of the data stream that is considered a historical timeline, as reported by the New York Times last year. Even though this information previously had questionable relevance, there is obviously an expectation of current importance and future potential.

(Am I a total geek for hoping that someone will dub in “Every Bit is Sacred” over a somewhat well known Monty Python tune?)

When I start thinking about the idea of saving all possible data, the image of my garage suddenly pops into my mind.

No matter how many new and valuable things I want to pack into it, I only have so much space.  And that leads me back to that The Economist article on “Data, data everywhere”, because they also reported on IDC studies indicating the amount of digital information being created already exceeds the amount of available storage, as illustrated in this chart.

Now this really starts to look like a classic hockey-stick problem.

In a Washington Post article earlier this year they cited a University of Southern California study regarding the massive overtaking of digital data over analog data, which this chart really illustrates.  The piece quotes one of the authors of the study, Martin Hilbert, who states that “Humans generate enough data - from TV and radio broadcasts, telephone conversations and, of course, Internet traffic - to fill our 276 exabyte storage capacity every eight weeks.”  And that’s JUST the human generated data!

So what does this mean now?  What happens when this starts to look like 0/1? Better technology and quantum mechanics to the rescue?

I don’t know.  But I do know the only way I fit more stuff in my garage is to organize, repack and prioritize what stays. Knowing there will come a time when you, your organization or your clients have more digital information than space available, how are you planning to prioritize?  Are you taking any steps now?

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• 450+ educational sessions, workshops, how-to clinics, Mavericks, Market overviews, Net IT Outs, Magic Quadrants/MarketScopes and roundtables from Gartner Analysts (up from 350+ sessions in 2010)
• More Gartner analysts onsite –170 (150 in 2010)
• Four+ hours of keynote presentations covering the latest trends
• 20+ hours of networking with peers from other companies
• CIO Program (pending approval) with an increase in workshops – 80 (58 in 2010)
• Role-Based Tracks: Increase in capacity and volume of interactive workshops and Net-IT Out short-form sessions
• Industry Program expansion on Sunday and throughout the week (gartner.com)

I am excited to present Infrastructure Cloud and Beyond on Monday, October 17th. 12:45-1:45PM (Room: Southern IV-V)

Through my presentation, you will learn about our strategy to harness the power of Cloud with best practices and examples. The presentation will provide information for organizations that are moving to a cloud service delivery model in order to remain agile, competitive and to improve operations and cost efficiency. As companies embark on their journey to the cloud, it’s critical to understand the path ahead. The foundational elements must include integrated components, virtualized infrastructure and be capable of dynamic scale. In my session, hear from CSC Corporation on how they are harnessing the power of cloud to provide federal cloud computing service delivery.

We also have fun giveaways and Q and A’s planned.  Please join me on Monday, October 17th.  12:45-1:45PM Room: Southern IV-V.

During the conference expo hours please stop by HDS’ booth located in the Pacific Hall of the Dolphin Hotel (booth #PS9). The booth will be jam packed with new HDS product information and strategy, HDS leaders and other fun things!

We want to help you start putting the power of Cloud in context to your goals by having better and more sophisticated insight for decisions and advancements.  In order to do this, we need more fluid content, which of course requires more dynamic infrastructure.  Find out how HDS is driving solutions to support infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud.

For more information on the conference, visit http://blogs.gartner.com/symposium-live-orlando/

I can’t wait to see you at the show (@mikisandorfi). Also, make sure to follow my colleague Tracey Doyle (@tdoyle49) who will have plenty of great updates as well.

Although most of us in IT stop at considering data and information as more tangible and actionable elements, it’s really in the later areas of knowledge and wisdom where we find things to be most useful—though also more ephemeral. Understanding how we advance from one to the other will help us more readily progress into developing greater insight. Misunderstanding means more mistakes and false starts.

Anjana Bala (Stanford University and former HDS intern) and I found looking at the DIWK concepts in the framework of a process to be very meaningful. If you consider the move from data to wisdom as a progression of understanding and connectedness, a clearer picture starts to emerge.  (Note that I’ve pulled explanations heavily from Jonathan Hey’s work on “The DIKW Chain” as well as the DIKW Wikipedia entry.)

1. We research and collect lots of factual elements to provide us data.

2. We add context to data to understand the relation of elements and gain information.

3. As we connect information in sets, we gain understanding of patterns and acquire knowledge.

4. When we start joining whole sets of knowledge we can understand how they relate to bigger principles to ultimately achieve wisdom.

Another interesting outcome of looking at this as a process is that it clearly shows that data, information and knowledge are attributable to better understanding the past.  We all understand that’s a critical basis, but our goals usually depend on insight into what we should do in the future, which requires wisdom.

At HDS, we’re passionate about data and information as our way to help you do great things.  Assisting in getting more value from data and information is core to what we do, and it’s why you’ll see us continue to invest in solutions related to data, content management and cloud. And it’s also why we’re working on additional innovations to help organizations move forward from data to information and knowledge.

Greasing this ‘DIKW’ process will significantly accelerate the rate of innovations, and I believe we’re very close to a knowledge tipping point in this area.  We should all do what we can to lubricate this process by considering ways to better connect the elements and more readily move understanding forward.

What might you help to improve?  Can you add to this high level list?

• Resource and data/information connections (consider cloud implications)
• Data standards and data virtualization
• Correlation tools and analytics
• Human-understandable results (e.g. data visualization)
• Processes that help internalize knowledge
• Next generation of hardware and software to support the above