Note: This post was updated on 6/30/09.

This morning Hitachi Data Systems announced some new enhancements to the AMS 2000 modular storage platform. These new enhancements include Dynamic Provisioning, Dense Expansion Trays, AMS 2500DC for NEBS compliance, 8Gbs FC storage ports, and security enhancements. Since we began shipping the AMS 2000 platform in October of last year we have shipped over 60PB on this platform, making this one of our more successful storage products in the modular storage market. To understand why this product is has garnered such acceptance we must first understand the modular storage market and what sets the AMS 2000 apart from the rest.

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USP V users are finding it easy to free up 30% to 40 % of existing storage capacity with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning. The best part is that they can convert their current “fat”, over allocated, volumes to thin provisioned volumes with, no down time to do migration, no rezoning of the SAN, and little or no impact to applications. more

Today, Hitachi Data Systems announced a new service offering called Storage Reclamation Services to help users reclaim allocated but unused space. This service uses a feature of our Dynamic Provisioning product called, Zero Page Reclaim. Zero Page Reclaim is used after a migration or restore of a normal volume into a Dynamic Provisioning pool where the volume is mapped into 42 MB page stripes. The microcode examines the pages, and when pages are found to be full of formatting zeros, that page is released back into the pool, leaving behind the pages in the volume that actually contain data. While the original allocation request has not changed, the allocated but unused space is freed up for other users who share the same Dynamic Provisioning pool of storage.

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Beth Pariseau posted a comment about IDC’s recent report on the drop off in external storage revenue in the 1st quarter of 2009. IDC reported that 1st quarter revenues for external storage declined by $5.6 B, or 18.2 %. It was noted by Beth that all but two of the top five major vendors, Dell and Hitachi, reported double digit declines. While Hitachi did report a loss, HDS realized a 1% gain year over year when measured in constant currency. more

Last night I watched the NBC special ” Inside the Obama White House” . If you didn’t see it click on the link above and checkout some of the videos from that program. The first segment introduces you to the staff, with young twenty type staffers, and everyone on Blackberrys.

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Last week I was in Switzerland to visit customers to see what was working and what we needed to improve. Since many of our customers there are banks, there was a lot of interest in our High Availability Manager announcement which makes it possible to fail over nondisruptively to a remote site. The application server just switches over to an alternate path that  connects to a consistent copy of the application data at a remote site without missing a beat.

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Yesterday, Hitachi announced the ability to cluster USP V/VM for high availability and non disruptive migration between current and future USP V/VM storage controllers. 

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How scalable is a cluster of cache controllers when you need performance?
The initial description of V-Max, describes it as a cluster of two controller systems that can in turn cluster to very large configurations. The challenges of a cluster of storage controllers is maintaining cache consistencies.

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As part of my job, I try to find ways to communicate the benefits and challenges of technology and business models, so I am always on the lookout for more effective ways to do this. more

In order to reduce costs, more and more users are looking to server and storage virtualization to enable consolidation, improve utilization, simplify operations, improve performance, and deliver improved data protection and availability.  While server and storage virtualization can be implemented separately, an integrated end-to-end server to storage virtualization can drive higher efficiencies for business continuity and disaster recovery.

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