Object Storage is a Horizontal Platform: HCP
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 [...]
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Hitachi UCP Pro for VMware vSphere – Extending Customer’s Value in Converged Infrastructure
With the release of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Pro for VMware vSphere, we introduced a number of firsts for converged infrastructure solutions The industry’s first converged platform offering 100% parity across RESTful API, CLI and GUI A truly unified, “single pane [...]
Here's the Beef
Having grown up in the 80s I recall fondly Wendy’s famous commercials with the charismatic woman pondering “where’s the beef”. In the included video she ends with, “I don’t think there’s anybody there. I really don’t.” The trip down memory [...]
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The World is No Longer Flat – It’s multi-dimensional
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 [...]
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The New Math of Magic Quadrants
My colleague Nick Winkworth published a great blog on the new Gartner Group “Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers” and how it positions HDS and our blade server offerings. It’s a worthy read. Given that I commented on the Magic Quadrant [...]
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FC or FCoE – Where do you invest for SAN?
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. Unlike storage systems, clients and servers are software that can be put on [...]
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When “Niche” Is Best
This week Gartner announced its latest “Magic Quadrant” report for blade servers. Once again Hitachi Blade servers are included in the report, and once again Hitachi’s position on the chart has moved upwards and to the right; improving in both [...]
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Performance Benchmarks for Midrange Products
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: SPC-1 IOPS™ represents the maximum [...]
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Hitachi Data Systems Highlights @NABshow 2013
As the final production truck has packed up and pulled away from the Las Vegas Convention Center declaring the end of the 2013 NAB conference, we look back at the new products and technologies announced at the show. One thing [...]
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Separation of Control and Data is a Key design Center for Hitachi IT platforms
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. [...]
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Hitachi Addresses the Challenges of Data Copies and Redefines Data Protection
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. Last March, I [...]
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Price of Flash and HDD
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 [...]
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Rapid Deployment of Microsoft Applications with Microsoft Private Cloud
Almost three years ago, Hitachi Data Systems was one of the first companies to announce solutions to support Microsoft’s Private Cloud Fast Track program. Our customers had been looking for cost-effective private cloud infrastructures that were both easy to deploy [...]
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Primary Storage Deduplication without Compromise
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 [...]
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The Storage Olympics Gets Magical
To those in the storage world who rejoice in being in-the-know about the ever shifting technology and vendor landscape in front of them, Gartner Magic Quadrants are seen as major events in the “Vendor Olympics” that our industry can often [...]
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In the Storage Array or in VMFS?
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 [...]
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IDC Report: Maintaining Copies for Insurance is Approaching Paranoia and Will Cost Businesses $44 Billion in 2013!
One of the trends that I identified for 2013 was the explosion of replicated data; this was trend #3 in my blog on December 13, 2012. IDC just published an Insight Report #10 entitled “The Copy Data Problem – An [...]
Protection Against Power Outages in Hitachi Storage Systems with Flash Media
Researchers from Ohio State, Mai Zheng and Feng Qin along with Joseph Tucek and Mark Lillibridge of HP labs, presented a paper entitled “Understanding the Robustness of SSDs under Power Fault.” The results of this paper have caused some concern [...]
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DNA for Long Term Storage
Irwin Kraus, one of my colleagues, sent me this article from Science News. The article describes how a team of researchers from the European Bioinformatics Institute in England, led by Nick Goldman, have stored five files, totaling about 750 kilobytes [...]
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Extending the Endurance of Flash with Hitachi Accelerated Flash Storage
Flash memory has a limited life that is determined by the number of times it is written and formatted. Data is written to a page of formatted cells, and the formatting is done to blocks of pages. Single-level cell (SLC) [...]
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