Not Clear on the Concept
by Claus Mikkelsen on Apr 30, 2012
I just returned from Cleveland and had the honor of presenting the HDS recent announcement of the Hitachi Unified Storage to customers of the CHI Corporation and hosted by the esteemed Greg @Knieriemen, and enjoyed presenting our new product for the first time.
On the flight to Cleveland I was reading some old magazines that had been accumulating on my coffee table and came across this cartoon from The New Yorker and thought it was appropriate for this post.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2011/11/21/cartoons_20111114#slide=7
The caption may be a bit hard to read, but it says “It was much nicer before people started storing their personal information in the cloud”. And although intended for humor, this is a classic example of the “concept” being misunderstood.
I have my own favorite story on “not clear on the concept”. When I returned from the military and rejoined IBM in 1970, I was greeted with technology that was job changing: IBM had implemented what was called the SUN Network, tying major IBM locations together electronically. An intranet, essentially. Shortly thereafter email was emerging as a new form of communication within the company.
I was completing a project with a colleague and after our final meeting asked him to document our agreement and send a note to me copying his manager and my manager. The next day I received 3 identical emails, which was a bit confusing, but 10 minutes later I received a phone call from him apologizing that he had sent me all 3 copies and asked me to return 2 of them so he could send them to his manager and mine. Not clear on the concept? Doh!
I will swear to the ends of the earth, that this is a true story. I’m not smart enough to make this stuff up.
What does this have to do with unified storage and HUS? Plenty, actually. Unified storage is the latest challenge in the industry and all the vendors are tripping over themselves bringing products to market. But what is the “concept” of unified storage? Is it packaging GigE, FC and iSCSI in a box and shipping it? I don’t think so. Unified storage is not packaging, it’s engineering and integration, which is what we’ve done.
For example, with HUS there are no static partitions of file storage and block storage, and capacity can be nondisruptively reassigned. Also, with the Hitachi Command Suite all of this storage, as well as any other storage in your data center, can be managed with one product, not separate products depending on the last storage acquisition your company has made.
The “concept” with unified storage can be summed up in a single word: UNIFIED! Not just another box that has packaged multiple protocols. There is a vast difference, and we were willing to invest the engineering effort to make it right. What a “concept”.
