Last month the storage world marked the passing of one of the most beloved pioneers of the storage industry, Jack Harker. Jack was one of the original developers of the first disk drive, the IBM RAMAC. He joined the IBM Storage Lab in 1952 when it was first established in San Jose, California. As a product manager and then the lab director, he was responsible for the IBM 3330 and the IBM 3340 Winchester, which was the first removable Head Disk Assembly HDA. Jack also led the IBM Technology and Advanced Development groups that were responsible for most of the technical innovations, including thin film heads, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jack was an IBM Fellow and the recipient of the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson medal. His many achievements are recorded on Wikipedia . There is also a lot of material about Jack in his two oral histories at the Computer History Museum,
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I recently interviewed my colleague Rex Carter, CIO of Hitachi Data Systems. He joined HDS in 2006 and has played a major role in the transformation of our company through the innovative use of IT technology. He is well known to many of our customers and partners as he seeks every opportunity to engage with them and share best practices. Rex and the IT team are rolling out a new BYOD solution, called HCP Anywhere to Hitachi Data Systems 6,000 employees.
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I have had a busy week in Hong Kong, with several of our executives providing an update for some customers and partners. There was a lot of interest in a new option that we will announce for our Hitachi Content Platform that will address the challenges of BYOD. BYOD is a great enabler for user productivity and innovation but can create a security risk for corporate IP. This option is a gateway that enables enterprise users to sync and share files via secure smart links so the latest version of their document is available on their iPhone, iPad, Windows, Mac, or browser and is shareable with authorized users for a specified period of time.
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In 2005 Thomas Friedman published his book, “The World is Flat” where he describes how globalization has changed the economy thanks to the Internet and workflow software. Some of the flattening events were: the fall of the Berlin wall that lifted the restrictions on access to technology, Netscape, outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring, and supply chain. He wrote about the epiphany he had on a golf course in India where Bangladesh and Silicon Valley companies were connected and collaborating across time zones and vast distances.
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While Ethernet networks were available for sometime to connect clients and servers in local area networks; we could not network storage until the introduction of Fibre Channel.
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Performance comparison between different products is dependent on the workload and is measured in terms of throughput, response time and price performance. The Storage Performance Council provides a standard workload and provides three standard metrics: Read More »
Recently Hitachi Data Systems announced new roles for several of our senior executives. The key part of the announcement was the appointment of our CEO, Jack Domme, as a Corporate Officer of Hitachi, Ltd. This means that Jack has an expanded leadership role in further advancing the globalization efforts of Hitachi and will report directly to Hitachi President Hiroaki Nakanishi. This will help expand Hitachi’s strategic Social Innovation initiative through the Information & Telecommunication Systems Company’s (ITSC) platform business on a global basis.
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My colleague Michael Hay recently provided a deeper dive into our primary dedupe capability for Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS), Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS), and HUS VM. He explains the differentiated architecture, which enables Hitachi Data Systems to provide primary dedupe without compromise.
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Today Hitachi Data Systems announced Hitachi Data Instance Manager (HDIM), which provides a holistic view and management of data copies (instances) to reduce the explosion of data copies, lower costs, and enhance the effectiveness of data protection.
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There is a lot of speculation about when the price of flash media will be on parity with hard disks. Several years ago, the projection was that lower cost MLC flash SSDs would cross over the SAS HDD price curve by 2019. This cross over point has been coming down rapidly as the volumes of flash SSDs have increased primarily at the expense of HDD volumes. (Remember when all PCs and even iPods had HDDs?) Last year some analysts projected that the cross over point would be reached in 2017, and more recently they are projecting sometime this year. This is for the general SSD market, which is not the same as the enterprise storage market. The cross over point for the enterprise storage market will be further out due to the performance and durability requirements for enterprise storage.
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