Hu's Blog

Those of you who frequently visit the VMware HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) website for SVD or Storage Virtualization Devices will have noticed that the Hitachi VSP is listed for ESX 4.1 with a footnote. That footnote will have a very important impact on where, when, and how you can use VMware with existing storage systems.

The first week of any new year brings great energy and ambition for the year ahead. While thinking about goals and priorities for the new year, I thought it would be interesting to look back on the most popular blog posts of 2010 based upon both traffic and comments.

It’s the first work week of 2011. The stock market is up and technology stocks are leading the way with the likes of Apple and HP. I believe this year we will see a focus on new technology as we begin to recover from the 2008/2009 downturn, and storage is no exception. We saw the [...]

This past year, there have been a number of vendors and analysts who have been touting the virtues of scale-out storage. Scale-out storage is always contrasted with scale-up storage. A typical description of scale-out storage will say that it provides rapid expansion of storage systems through the horizontal addition of storage nodes (servers with cache [...]

Each year, I like to take a look at the storage industry and provide my thoughts on what I think will be the key trends to watch for in the coming year. So, as 2010 comes to a close, here are my thoughts on the top trends for 2011 that we’ll see around the transformation [...]

Until now, there have been two basic types of storage architectures -  modular two controller storage systems with separate controller caches, and enterprise storage systems with multiple controllers and a global cache, which shared one cache image of data with multiple controllers. The modular storage system was designed for direct attach to open systems workstations. [...]

Since the announcement of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and the Hitachi Command Suite 7 (HCS), our corporate executives have been travelling the world in support of our Information Forums, which will become an annual event. I was invited to some countries in Europe and started with a week of Executive Briefings for customers [...]

In the beginning of this year, I posted a blog entry on New Considerations for Tiered Storage where I talked about the benefits of using virtualization to dynamically move volumes between tiers of storage and Dynamic Provisioning to thin provision and provide wide stripe performance to optimize the use of different tiers of storage. In [...]

The “It” is bottlenecks. As soon as you clear a bottleneck at one level, the bottleneck pops up at the next lower level.