Hu's Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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:

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.

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.

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 [...]

Deduplication (dedupe) has been available for some time; however, the performance impact of using dedupe has made it impractical to use during primetime file serving. Data has to remain un-duped until time can be scheduled, during off-peak hours, for this task. This results in having to pay a capacity consumption “tax,” plus it works against [...]

VMware provides a rich menu of storage services, which can be used to enhance commodity storage systems. However, VMware can provide more services for the application if they can offload the cycles that are used for storage services to intelligent storage systems. VMware realizes this and provides VAAI to offload services like SCSI reservation, disk [...]