Hu's Blog

At the top of my list of trends to watch in 2012 was an increased focus on storage efficiency due to economic uncertainty and hard disk supply shortages—stemming from last year’s floods in Thailand. Yesterday IDC and Gartner both reported declines in 4th quarter PC shipment of 1.4 to 0.2%, compared to 2010 that was [...]

Happy 2012! While this year is starting with a lot of uncertainty around the world economy and supply/demand questions, there are still areas of assurance. One is that you can still do more with less to meet your storage needs.

As we close out 2011, the storage industry has seen significant growth based on budgets, which were established in the beginning of the year. However, over the course of 2011, we saw natural disasters, political upheaval, and heightened economic turmoil. Companies are now looking ahead to 2012 with a great deal of uncertainty around their [...]

The big hype in 2012 will be around Big Data. The explosion of unstructured data and mobile applications will generate a huge opportunity for the creation of business value, competitive advantage, and decision support if this data can be captured, stored, managed, accessed, analyzed, and visualized. Companies that provide these capabilities for Big Data will [...]

The number of applications that are consolidated onto a SAN attached storage frame has increased dramatically with the adoption of virtual servers. This is making it increasingly more difficult to migrate the data when the storage system needs to be refreshed. The quantity of data is in the tens or even hundreds of TBs, which [...]

Server and desktop virtualization will increase the need for enterprises to scale up storage systems as physical server demands increase. Initial installations of server virtualization were done to consolidate non-critical application servers, which were installed on lower cost modular, dual controller, storage systems. As multiple servers were virtualized and consolidated onto a single physical server, [...]

Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) combines with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to provide an “edge-to-core” data solution that eliminates the need for backup and delivers a seemingly bottomless filer on the edge of a cloud, or for remote office/branch offices.

As you may have read already, I led off my 2012 trends blog series with a post on a “Focus on increasing storage utilization.” I have talked with many customers who have seen utilization of storage assets increase from 20% -30%, and 50% – 60% using efficiency tools such as thin provisioning, dynamic tiering, deduplication, [...]

What is Data Virtualization? Data virtualization is the separation of data from the application so that it can be maintained and accessed independent of the application. It also means that it can be accessed by other applications without the need to create additional working copies and maintain the synchronization of these extra copies. With one [...]

Storage systems will need to become storage computers as more functions are being driven down into them. Old storage architectures with general purpose controllers which service all these new functions—along with the normal I/O workload—will not be able to scale. New storage architectures with separate pools of processors will be required to handle these additional [...]