Hitachi Data Systems grew by +5% in the quarter ending in March. This continued our string of 14 consecutive record quarters of year on year growth due to our early commitment to virtualization and the expansion of our portfolio into file, content and converged solutions. While other companies may be pulling back during this transition in the marketplace, Hitachi Data Systems is investing in growth.

Over the last year we have expanded our presence all over the world. Hitachi Data Systems now does business in 150 countries and regions globally, including Africa since our acquisition of Shoden Data Systems. In 2012, we expanded our local assembly capabilities in Brazil to support the needs of a more mature Latin America region given its current growth rates. We also opened new offices in countries such as India, China, and Colombia.

Hitachi Data Systems Englewood Facilities Opening Event

Last week I attended the opening of our new Englewood facilities near Denver, Colorado. This is a 53,000+ sq. ft. facility where we will house a sub office of our corporate headquarters, an operations center, global help desk, development lab, and district sales office.  Our CEO Jack Domme, EVP of Global Solutions Strategy & Development John Mansfield, and SVP of Global Accounts Kevin Eggleston all live in Denver. Since Denver is a major airline hub, it has direct flights to all our major offices including a new 787 service to Tokyo.

Our operations center and global help desk are integral to the new facility. The operations center provides a single global support process for all of our IT operations to improve service and fix issues before they impact our IT users. We use our own tools like Hitachi Command Director to understand how they can be leveraged to improve IT operations worldwide for our customers. We also insource our global help desk for first call resolution to increase customer contact.

Global Operations Center

Global Help Desk

This facility also houses our newest Global Solutions Strategy & Development Lab that hosts new development projects across our teams, including QA efforts for software, file and content, and other new solutions. Our advanced technical consultants will also use this lab for Americas sales support. The lab has a slab floor with overhead cabling and cooling for easy configuration changes. It has outside air cooling and high-speed connections back to the Santa Clara office and our other development labs around the world.

The Rocky Mountain sales and support offices are also located at this facility and an upcoming Executive Briefing Center as well. The new facility currently houses about 250 people with plans to double in size.

Some key customers and partners attended the opening event and tour of our facility. Shunsuke Ono, Consulate –General of Japan, celebrated closer ties between Japan and the Denver area. Kristin Russell, Secretary of Technology and CIO for the State of Colorado, was instrumental in helping us locate to this new facility.  In addition, Sherri Hammons, CTO for the State of Colorado, and Eric Mitisek, president of the Colorado Technology Association, were in attendance. The reception by the Colorado technical community was outstanding and very much appreciated.

Many thanks to our customers and partners who supported us in our success and the opening of our new facility. We look forward to the innovation that the new Denver facility will bring to HDS, our customers and our partners

Can you tell us how you have come to be the expert in this area?  

I’ve worked in software my whole career, both as a developer and also within product management. In 2002, I began by working at EMC on Centera, the first commercial instantiation of an object store. I then worked on Atmos in the early stages and subsequently came to HDS in 2009 as an architect in the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) engineering team. I worked with a team that set about transforming HCP from an archive product to more of a general-purpose object store that would be suitable for cloud applications. I then took over the product management teams for HCP, Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI), and HCP Anywhere.

Our strategy for addressing the explosion of data is based upon virtualization. We virtualize block and file infrastructure through our VSP, HUS VM and HNAS platforms to help customers reduce operational costs and leverage their capital assets. How does HCP support virtualization? 

Abstraction or virtualization is fundamental to object stores. HCP provides storage virtualization at the hardware and software layers, both to the end user (client applications) and the storage administrator. In the process, HCP shifts the client model, essentially presenting storage as a service. Such abstraction allows for comparatively naïve users and administrators as HCP takes care of the detail of how and where data is stored, protected, geo-replicated, de-duplicated, versioned, garbage collected, etc. In this respect I think that HCP is the next evolution in the virtualization that you’ve described, where virtualization reaches the point of simply pointing to a service access point, requesting the data, and having it presented without any detail of the underlying mechanisms (hardware or software) involved in producing that data. 

You mention an object store. What is an object and what is an object store?

While there isn’t a universal definition of what constitutes an object in the context of storage, generally an object is considered to be the union of the user data and metadata.  Distilled to its simplest definition, an object store is a database for unstructured data, typically comprised of two components, metadata and user data. There are two types of metadata, system metadata (SMD) and custom metadata (CMD). We store custom metadata as files (serialized as XML) in a distributed file system along with the user data, referred to as data objects or blobs.

What is the importance of metadata and how is it used?

Metadata allows us to add structure to unstructured data by providing the connective tissue to logically bind otherwise discrete objects. Additionally metadata allows us to add semantic meaning to opaque data objects. For example, if you upload a picture to an object store purely for data storage reasons, that has one level of value, namely data durability and availability. However, if you can annotate that object with key-value pairs such as who is in the picture and where it was taken, you’ve added semantic meaning to the object that can be queried and manipulated programmatically to connect this picture to other objects with similar traits (such as pictures with the same people in them, or taken at the same location).

Object stores vary significantly on the degree of flexibility allowed with metadata. HCP has evolved this ability quite a bit over the last three years. Today HCP allows the user (client application) to annotate the user data with arbitrary text in the form of key-value pairs.  HCP uses XML as the serialization format for persisting metadata and XPATH structured queries against that metadata. This allows the system to return specific answers to user queries, rather than a collection of potential matches.

To allow sophisticated searches against the combined metadata (system and custom) we first index the sum of the metadata. We used XPATH to extract the key-value pairs from the customer metadata to create an inverted index. Once this index has been created, users can query the metadata in one of two ways:

• Through the GUI – which allows them to do a Google-like query
• Programmatically through the MQE (Metadata Query Engine) interface. 

How do we obtain metadata in the first place? Applications are not likely to provide metadata, which allow data to be accessed by other applications.

This is a tough problem. Applications that write to a structured database (DB) typically do so in an well-defined manner, leveraging SQL, that readily allows other applications to query that DB, independent of the creating application. In the unstructured world it’s not nearly so clean. Often the only way to access the full set of information associated with unstructured data is through the creating application, which greatly limits the value the business can derive from this data. Since unstructured data is by far the predominant data form in the 21st century, this is a non-trivial problem for companies if they wish to derive business value from their accumulated data mass. For HCP we have developed some standard packages for ingesting and indexing data such as Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) as you described in your previous blog post.

Are object stores a replacement for file systems?

A common misperception is that object stores are a replacement for file systems; instead, they are an augmentation. The file system is tightly coupled to the operating system and provides a well-established mechanism for organizing files within a hierarchy of directories. By contrast, an object store focuses on changing the presentation layer to the storage consumer (typically an application) through a simplified interface (REST) while achieving enormous scale by aggregating many file systems into a single, higher-order grouping.

Can you describe how an object store changes the presentation layer?

The figure below presents an abstract view of the storage stack for a single node (storage server). The function of each superior layer in the stack is to aggregate and abstract the layer beneath, permitting greater sophistication and specialization in each layer without increasing complexity to clients of upper layers. The object storage layer creates a distributed storage service to client applications without requiring the clients to manage data distribution.

 In this sense it provides a similar function to Hadoop. The point of Hadoop is to simplify distributed programming by having Hadoop worry about the messy details of splitting up jobs over many servers (the “map” function), handling errors and combining the results into a single, simple form (the “reduce” function). Similarly, an object store worries about the detail of how to break up and distribute data over many storage servers while presenting to the client the veneer of a simple, single simple form (a data object) wholly contained within a global namespace.

Thanks, Bob, for helping us understand what an object store is and the value it provides as a service for storing data without the need to worry about the underlying infrastructure. HCP provides virtualization of hardware and software to the application client as well as the storage administrator, making it easier to scale, use, and administer.

I will follow up this interview in another blog to understand how we can ingest different types of data using different protocols and still be able to do a common query to find the content we need among billions of objects.

• Automation with policy-driven storage provisioning – SLAs replace technology details
• Virtual volumes – allowing a more transparent mapping between large volumes and the VM disk images within them, to allow better performance and data management optimizations
• Commodity hardware with storage logic abstracted into a software layer
• Programmability – management interfaces that span traditional storage array products, as a particular definition of separating “control plane” from “data plane”
• Abstraction of the logical storage services and capabilities from the underlying physical storage systems, including techniques such as in-band storage virtualization
• Scale-out architecture

I would say that this provides a fairly good description of what I would envision as SDS, except for the point on commodity hardware with storage logic abstracted into a software layer. This has led some analysts to predict that storage functions and intelligence will shift to the server and purchasing will shift to commoditized hardware. On the contrary, storage hardware must become more intelligent to include the storage logic, which can be initiated or automated by events or polices that are defined by application or server software. This has already happened with VMware, as evidenced by the company’s motivation to off load server functions to storage systems through APIs like VAAI and VASA in order for VMware to be more efficient in supporting virtual machines. This requires more intelligence in the storage to support these APIs and provide visibility through vCenter.

In addition to scale-out architecture, I would add the requirement to scale up as a characteristic of SDS. Virtual servers that host many virtual machines are today’s mainframes. Even though they may run on x86 blades and use the SCSI protocol, their I/O workload and demand for availability scales up with the addition of each virtual machine. Scaling out by adding another storage node in a cluster does not help the storage ports that are supporting the virtual server. You need the ability to scale up the power and capacity behind those ports by adding processors, cache, and storage dynamically as the workload increases. This takes intelligence in the storage system. Scaling out is a commodity play that does not meet the demands of virtual servers.

The goal of SDS should not be to commoditize storage in order to reduce the cost of storage, the goal should be to automate storage services to increase the return on total IT assets. This automation should include:

1.  Retention services
2.  Provisioning services
3. Performance optimization services
4. Availability and reliability services
5. Capacity optimization services

The unique characteristic of storage, which sets it apart from servers and networks, is its need to preserve the data. Retention services include the requirements for security, privacy, immutability, audit trail, encryption and shredding. Provisioning services include dynamic provisioning, formatting, non-disruptive migration, and connectivity. Performance optimization services, includes the ability to not only record, search and retrieve data to meet application requirements, but also to provision and refresh the storage infrastructure to meet business requirements. Availability and reliability requires data protection, snapshots, DR, pre-emptive maintenance and quality of service. Capacity optimization or efficiency requires thin provisioning, dynamic provisioning, a pool of shared resources, and the elimination of storage silos for different applications.

These are just a few examples of services that need to be automated to reduce OPEX and CAPEX and increase return on IT assets, which includes, storage, server, network, people and environmental assets. In order to achieve this automation the storage system must be designed to do this from the inside out. You cannot do this with software that is running outside of the storage system. Software can request these services or set policies to initiate them, but the services need to be executed by the storage system so that the server and host software can do what they do best, serve the application and its clients.

My colleague Greg Knieriemen sums it up best.

“The value for the consumer of enterprise storage is in automation. As the role of the IT admin evolves, they want to spend less time managing their IT resources. As I see it, there are two significant elements to software defined storage as the industry perceives it today:

1. The abstraction of physical storage resources
2. SLA/policy driven management of those abstracted storage resources to deliver a defined QoS automatically

The capabilities within Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) (and Hitachi Unified Storage VM) give us a significant advantage over most of the other vendors in this regard.

I also think some in the industry have confused the abstraction and commoditization of storage resources to mean we’ll be using magical storage white boxes as storage components. While the storage resource logic may be abstracted and managed by software, the storage hardware itself still retains unique value in delivering QoS.”

Storage has always been about software and that software is growing as more functionality is pushed down into the storage through APIs like VMware VAAI, adapters and providers like SQL Server Remote Blob Store Provider, and Oracle plugins for RMAN integration. The intelligence in storage systems is in millions of lines of code — called microcode. The requisites for SDS called out in the Wikipedia post: virtual volumes, abstraction of storage logic, programmability – all the functionality prerequisite to automation of data and storage services are present in VSP, HUS VM, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS). Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) extends this automation to a software defined data center with the orchestrated management of server, storage, and network through the vCenter interface for VMware.

My colleague Claus Mikkelsen and I were privileged to have worked for Jack when he was the lab director in the IBM San Jose Lab in the 1970s. Jack was not only well known for his innovative leadership, but also for his true concern and respect for the individual. He made a deep impression on our young professional and personal lives. After Claus and I joined Hitachi Data Systems we learned that one of our product marketing managers, John Harker, was Jack’s son. When we learned this we asked John to invite his dad to a luncheon here at HDS where we could have the  privilege of hosting him and introducing him to our team.

Having the experience of spending time with Jack, who had contributed so much to our industry, really inspired us. He talked about what the IBM team had accomplished rather than about himself and he was interested in what we were doing. After the luncheon we thanked Jack for coming and said our goodbyes. As I was going up the stairs to my cubical, I happened to look back and see Jack giving his son a warm hug. I am sure that of all the accolades and honors he achieved, the love of his family was most important.

Q: Rex, thank you for agreeing to do this interview.  One of the biggest challenges that our customers are facing is the proliferation of mobile devices and the exposure of corporate data through the use of outside services to share information.  Many companies have banned the use of mobile devices and outside services in the workplace.  I would like to get your perspective on the use of mobile devices as our CIO.  

A:    Many CIOs have banned the devices and have set policies to control accesses to outside facilities.  Others have embraced BYOD and the new capabilities provided by these ubiquitous devices and network access.   From a CIOs perspective, BYOD is permitting the merging of personal life devices and work/enterprise devices by enabling them to sync and share files across these devices.  This capability is desired by employees, particularly our tech savvy/Silicon Valley type of employees.  For enterprise IT, it adds complexity and costs in data and device security, application testing and support (browser compatibility), and customer support/IT help desk.

Q: I can see how the merger of personal life devices and work devices can increase productivity and increase job satisfaction, but as you point out it adds complexity and costs to IT. I am aware that you have been running a pilot with a new solution called HCP Anywhere.  What is it and how does it solve the problem of data and device security?

A: What HCP Anywhere does is allow the secure syncing and sharing of files from multiple devices and from any location. Once you enable the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Option to your Windows server, you register and download the client code to your devices. This connects your devices to our Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) where your files are stored. It enables the enterprise class of security and controls required for CIOs, auditors and others concerned about IT asset protection, management and monitoring.  These capabilities are lacking in some form or another from outside, consumer-grade file sharing systems that were developed for family photos or similar files. If you use some of these services mainly intended for personal documents for storage of enterprise data, you have control/compliance issues, and enough vulnerability issues to give an auditor a heart attack.          

Q:I understand that our CEO Jack Domme was one of the first to use HCP Anywhere. Is it difficult to use? 

A: HCP Anywhere has been a big hit with all users.  It is so easy and yes, even executives want to use it.  Both our CEO and COO have their Air Books, tablets, smart phones and office PCs connected and sharing documents.  Itprovides   t secure easy access to information while they are traveling that they did not have in the past.  No need to carry a PC and be tethered to the internet for those critical documents that they need to share with authorized users. A critical part of our product roll out is to be an aggressive, early, best in class user.  It makes our products better and the experience for our customers improved.     

Q: What key features have stood out to you about HCP Anywhere?

A: Enterprise class controls, security and administration for our documents and IP.  Files are synced and up to date and the user controls what can be shared and for how long.  We also have the ability to wipe a device if an employee leaves the company or loses a device. 

Q: Anything that surprised you with HCP Anywhere? Any unexpected benefit or challenge? 

A:  Ease of use is superior.  It supports a self-serve, self-sufficiency model, while providing all the features our compliance staff require. The client for iPhone and iPads can be downloaded from iTunes.  Our broad employee base can set up their own sharing and self-defined collaboration groups in a fully secured and controlled access manner.  This is facilitating product development and analysis throughout HDS.  We have been able to reduce IT internal support time in set up and administration of these collaborative efforts. It has also reduced the amount of storage and the need for backup.   

Q: Tell us about some of the other tools that your team has implemented to help us be more productive. 

A:   In addition to using Sharepoint, we have created internal online communities using Jive software, we call it the Loop. When we work on an announcement or other projects we can set up a social media community. In addition to providing a way to synchronize the sharing of information, Jive also provides social media metrics to monitor the conversation. This empowers all the stakeholders working on the project to take ownership and collaborate with full transparency. By the way this is all stored on HCP.

Q:Any last thought or comments you would like to share with other CIOs?

A:  Most of our customers tell us that their employees want to have all the capabilities at work that are found in the consumer device world. Unauthorized devices and public shareware is often the result.  With the right tools, enterprise IT can meet all the rigors of security and compliance while meeting the desires of our very tech savvy employee communities.  The right tools, like HCP Anywhere, empower our employees with capabilities they desire, while reducing IT support requirements and making all our compliance staff very content. This is huge win for all the constituents we serve. The trend to BYOD presents many opportunities for increasing innovation, but it also presents many IT challenges. You can try to embrace it or try to ban it. Doing nothing is not an option for a CIO.

Rex, thanks for sharing your insights on HCP Anywhere from a CIO’s perspective. I am ready to download the HCP Anywhere client and register my devices so I can leave my laptop in the office.

On my way back from Hong Kong I was catching up on my email and web feeds, when I came across this conversation between Chris Mellor and Enrico Signoretti regarding object storage.

Chris Mellor created this post, which asked the question: “Object Storage: A solution in search of a problem?” Chris believes that object storage has failed to launch because “end users are confused about what object storage really is, how it gets purchased (and why) and how it gets used.” This piqued my interest since our HCP is an object store and because many of the key cloud use cases use object storage to store photos, documents, perform sync and share and so forth.  Enrico Signoretti joined the conversation and provided his perspective, which happens to be inline with Hitachi Data Systems view of HCP as an object storage platform.

Enrico describes object storage as a horizontal platform capable of managing many different data types. The use case requires many different approaches, protocols, and solutions, which need to be provided through gateways and the compelling driver for adoption is TCO. Object storage can provide real savings in the costs of backup, archive, compliance, DR, retention, etc. He represents object storage with this model.

A horizontal platform

This happens to match our model for HCP very well.

HCP is the software that runs in rack server nodes, up to 80 federated nodes that attach to any of our block storage family. You can use our gateways or you can build your own to meet your specific needs.

The launch of HCP has been very successful and we have many customers in production. You can look at our list of references for more details.

There does seem to be a lack of understanding around object storage so I will follow up on this post with an interview with Bob Primmer, who heads up our product management for HCP. He has a great way of simplifying the concepts behind object storage and the value of our implementation in HCP.

Thomas Friedman recently had an article, “It’s a 401(K) World”, published in the April 30 edition of the New York Times, where he revisits this world and sees that it has drastically changed. In this article he notes that in the last 10 years we went from a connected world to a hyper-connected world. Following is an excerpt from the article:

“I’m always struck that Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high-speed broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago when I wrote a book called “The World Is Flat.” All of that came since then, and the combination of these tools of connectivity and creativity has created a global education, commercial, communication and innovation platform on which more people can start stuff, collaborate on stuff, learn stuff, make stuff (and destroy stuff) with more other people than ever before.”

This really empowers the individual to do more, but with one big difference –  more responsibility now rests with the individual. That is why Thomas likens this to the 401(K) world where companies no longer manage to provide funds for retirement and we now have the responsibility to invest in our own retirement. Some will invest well while others will not. It seems that the level playing field that was envisioned in the “Flat World” has now turned multi-dimensional with the knowledge and power that it gives to individuals.

The futurist Ray Kurzwell pointed out in a Time Magazine article in March of 2012 that, “A kid in Africa with a smart phone has access to more information than the President of the United States 15 years ago.”  While that could be very empowering for this child, someone in a more entitled position could use that information more effectively.

Recently I spoke to a large health insurance provider in the United States who is gearing up to meet the 2014 deadline for the Affordable Care Act that was enacted in 2010. In order to seek affordable care for all citizens, this act provides for a web-based health insurance exchange where consumers can compare prices and purchase plans. It also provides subsidies to enable those with limited means to be able to buy insurance. This puts a greater responsibility on  consumers to make decisions on their healthcare coverage. In order to make this decision consumers will need information, which will be provided by the healthcare insurers who want their business. The healthcare insurance provider who used to sell to corporate customers, must now change their business model to sell to individuals. Now that the providers are in the consumer business, they must use the latest tools like mobile apps, to sell to, sell up, and cross sell different products by providing information. They must also apply big data analytics to find information about their potential customers.

This is just one of many examples of how the world is changing due to the greater access to information. Hopefully we can do this responsibly through social innovation, so that the less fortunate among us will not be left behind.

Unlike storage systems, clients and servers are software that can be put on hold if the network is busy. If a client sends a data packet and the server or network is busy, Ethernet throws the data packet away and tells the client to try again later. The client waits and resends the packet and repeats this until it gets an acknowledgement of receipt.

The server to storage connection is not that polite. Servers do not expect storage to throw away their I/O requests and they do not expect to wait on the storage. Unfortunately storage is a mechanical device and it depends on some mechanical latencies. Data is stored in sectors on a track on a rotating disk. In order to access data the read/write head must “seek” to the right track on the disk, and then time it so that it can read the right sector as it flies by the read/write head. If the storage system is busy when the sector flies by, you have to wait a revolution, or several revolutions until the server gets upset and times out causing disruption to the application.

FC solved this problem by using a buffer credit system. The server does not send an FC packet to storage or to a switch in the storage network unless it has the credits to insure that there are enough buffers in the storage or switch to receive the FC packet. This enables multiple servers to use the same FC switched network, which allows IT administrators to consolidate their storage requirements onto common pools of storage and eliminate the cost of storage silos.

Having two different networks for client server and server storage is costly so IT administrators  would like to consolidate that onto one protocol, hence Fibre Channel over Ethernet was developed. FCoE uses Ethernet and solves the problem of throwing packets away so that servers and storage can use Ethernet to do I/O. However, currently FCoE does not do well with congestion and it still suffers from the timeout problem if there is too much activity on the network. There are standards that are being finalized to address this around Data Center Ethernet, so these issues should be solved soon.

In the meantime FC speeds have increased to 16 Gbps while Ethernet speeds are still at 10 Gbps. Ethernet has plans for 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps, but this will take some time for adoption. What do you do in the meantime when the demand for storage continues to explode? Should you invest in FC or in FCoE for your storage networking requirements?

Hitachi Data Systems is addressing this question by announcing support for the new Cisco MDS 9710 Director and MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch. The MDS 9710 and 9250i offer both FC and FCoE capabilities, which gives customers the flexibility to deploy FC now and also gives the ability to transition to FCoE in the future.

The new MDS 9710 Director delivers one platform for both high density Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Using two new line rate cards to support high density fibre channel and fibre channel over ethernet:

•          48 port 16G Fibre Channel line card – supports up to 384 line rate 16 GB Fibre Channel ports

•          48 port 10G FCoE line card – supports up to 384 line rate 10 GE FCoE ports

Cisco’s MDS 9250i Fabric Switch for storage services offers up to line rate performance across 40 Ports 16G FC, 8 Ports 10 GE FCoE and 2 Ports 10 GE FCIP/iSCSI while also providing high-performance SAN extension solutions.

The Cisco MDS 9710 Director and 9250i services switch complement the scalability of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), with a highly reliable and virtualized networked storage infrastructure. This infrastructure provides future-proof storage connectivity for mission-critical applications, delivering massive amounts of data and enabling cloud-based environments. The Cisco Unified Fabric Solution, combined with the unique Hitachi Command Suite management platform, transforms data center management by delivering end-to-end visibility and control of the entire infrastructure.

Hitachi Data Systems and Cisco continue their tradition of sales and delivery model alignment, enabling customers to work with one infrastructure vendor, yet realize the benefits of a networked storage infrastructure solution.

• SPC-1 IOPS™ represents the maximum I/O request throughput at the 100% load point.
• SPC-1 Price-Performance™ is the ratio of total price to SPC-1 IOPS™. Total price includes the cost of the priced storage configuration plus three years of hardware maintenance and software support.  It is based on the vendors list prices.
• Response Time is the difference between an I/O request’s completion time minus its start time.

HDS invests in performance benchmarks so that our buyers have external validation when evaluating our products. This detailed information is made available for an apples-to-apples comparison to products from other vendors and offers an estimate of the kind of performance in a simulated real-world application environment.

We recently completed SPC-1 benchmarks for our Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) family of products, which shows some very interesting results in terms of total cost. Here are the SPC-1 results for the HUS family:

First we see on the HUS 150 that 20 SSD drives (4TB) can replace 896 10K SAS Small Form Factor drives  (269TB) and reduce the $/IOPS by 2.7 times and reduce the average response time by 2.2 times, while increasing the throughput by about 14%. Although SSDs are still more expensive than hard drives, the price performance is significantly better.

Next we see that the HUS VM with its enterprise architecture, which includes 16 processors with 256GB of global cache, has 65% higher throughput and 25% lower response time, at 80% of the lower priced HUS 150. The HUS VM tests were run with a fewer number of more expensive 15K SAS drives so the cost of the drives was comparable. At this time we have not done SPC-1 tests on the HUS VM with SSD or flash drives, but we expect that the improvements will be at least comparable to the improvements seen with SSDs on the HUS 150.

If performance is not a concern, HUS 150 is still the best value for capacity. However, if you want high performance, HUS VM provides the best value in the midrange price point. If you have an existing HUS 150 you can improve performance by adding SSDs.

If you don’t have an HUS 150 or HUS VM here are some comparisons with competitive midrange products without SSDs.

And here is one with SSDs

Unfortunately there are no comparisons with EMC products. While EMC is a member of the Storage Performance Council they choose not to runs these benchmarks.

Please go to the Storage Performance Council website for the latest results:

HUS 150 w/SSDs 

 HUS 150 w/HDDs

HUS VM w/HDDs

This announcement is significant in that Jack is the first non-Japanese Corporate Officer in the more than 100 year history of Hitachi, Ltd. This is a culmination of a journey that started in 1989 when an American company, National Advanced Systems, was acquired as a joint venture by EDS (Electronic Data Systems) and Hitachi, Ltd. primarily to market Hitachi mainframe systems in the U.S. market.  The new name of this company was Hitachi Data Systems, which was a logical combination of Hitachi and EDS.  When I joined this HDS, the culture was still very U.S. centric. While HDS marketed in Asia and some major countries in Europe, Comparex was the primary reseller of Hitachi mainframes in Europe.

In 1999, as the mainframe market declined, Hitachi exited the mainframe business except Japan, bought out EDS and established Hitachi Data Systems as the global reseller of Hitachi storage systems everywhere in the world except in Japan. More importantly, Hitachi began the transformation of HDS into a Hitachi Company under the leadership of Jun Naruse, who had previously lead the development of Hitachi Storage Systems in Japan. Mr. Naruse and succeeding CEOs Shinjiro Iwata and Minoru Kosuge introduced Hitachi’s 100-year-old core principles of Wa (harmony), Makoto (sincerity), and Kaitakusha-seishin (pioneering spirit).Under this leadership, HDS began the transformation from a three-letter company to become Hitachi Data Systems, an integral part of Hitachi, Ltd.

Jack Domme joined Hitachi Data Systems in 2004 and brought in a management team that began the transformation from purely a sales and marketing company to an information solutions company with an integrated value chain with its own R&D resources in keeping with the principle of Kaitakusha-seishin. Jack started this transformation several years ago with a redesign of our software management suite and provided a vision to carry virtualization beyond the infrastructure to content and then to information. Today, we have hundreds of engineers outside of Japan devoted to creating our next generation solutions – most of which are beyond traditional storage. These engineers work in close alignment with other Hitachi groups in development and research all over the world.

In 2009, Jack became our CEO and began to expand our IT portfolio with the acquisition of the Archivas content platform (now known as Hitachi Content Platform – HCP), followed more recently with the marketing of Hitachi blade servers and the acquisition of the BlueArc high performance object file platform.

In addition to incorporating Kaitakusha-seishin, the other Hitachi principles of harmony and integrity have become an integral part of  Hitachi Data Systems culture and are reflected in awards such as FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work For and one of Ethisphere’s Most Ethical Companies for three consecutive years . Recently, Hitachi Data Systems was selected as the top enterprise storage vendor by the readers of Storage Magazine, and swept all 5 categories for quality of Sales Force Competence, Product Quality, Product Features, Product Reliability, and Technical Support.

In parallel, Hitachi, Ltd. was also going through a transformation under the leadership of Hiroaki Nakanishi, who became president in 2010.  The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and The Economist have recognized Hitachi as undergoing one of the most remarkable turnarounds in Japanese corporate history. The Economist noted that Mr. Nakanishi’s approach to change is through leadership. He has put the burden on his managers to benchmark Hitachi’s units against global firms, not only Japanese ones. Since the global economic crisis in 2009, Hitachi has firmly set its sights on the global market. The impetus is to think faster and more globally due to the nature of the world’s changing markets.

At the time of The Economist article last year, Mr. Nakanishi noted that he was keen to promote foreigners to Hitachi Corporate offices. He specifically mentioned the Information and Telecommunications Systems Company. This month, Jack Domme became the first non Japanese Hitachi Corporate Officer, reporting directly to our Hitachi President.

For me this is the culmination of a long journey from a joint venture by EDS and Hitachi, Ltd. to Hitachi Data Systems to an integral part of Hitachi, Ltd. We now have a single heritage and are in a position to leverage our information solutions with the vertical strength of Hitachi Ltd., to pursue our shared goal of Social Innovation.

Innovation begins with leadership and we have been fortunate to have great leadership at Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi, Ltd.