Data Center Advisors

It has certainly been a long few weeks (months!) getting ready for today’s launch of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), and although I should be tired, I’m more enthused than ever. Anyone who has ever launched a product knows the routine and the feeling, but this launch and its products are rare, as they combine a lot of the visions that we’ve had for years.

I wrote an article a few years back called “Buckets, Pipes, and Pools” that described what I saw as a disturbing trend in the storage industry, in that many of the “players” were intent on rushing another “bucket” of storage to market. Need archiving? Ship that bucket. Midrange? Enterprise? NAS? Ship those buckets as well. Oh, and for managing all of these buckets, we’ll just have to ship separate storage management products with different interfaces. The “pipes” were the various protocols that would fill the buckets. And the “pool” was the vision of where I believed, and my company believed, the storage industry should be headed.

Fast forward a few years and we (HDS) are celebrating that accomplishment. The tagline that our marketing group came up with was “One Platform for All Data” with “Unified Management” and it’s a very apt description. The combination of the hardware (Virtual Storage Platform or VSP) and the management software (Hitachi Command Suite or HCS) has become that “pool”; one thing to manage for all of your data.

Furthermore — to extend the pool metaphor — pooling implies savings and weíve delivered on that as well:

• Expected 33% TCO reduction in first year
• Up to 70% reduction in drive costs
• Reduction in environmentals of 30% or more
• Fewer people to manage more data
• Simplified management with a view from the business application level

Think about it. All of your structured data, unstructured data, rich media, archive data, virtual tape, block and file, and mainframe and open systems residing in the same virtual pool. And within that pool is the intelligence to flow data from one tier of media to another based on access patterns.

I’ll discuss more detail on this in the days to come, but weíre having a great launch here in Santa Clara at our first Hitachi Information Forum. The weather is nice, and at the end of the day, I might just take a dip in that hotel pool here. That would be an appropriate end to a long journey.