Techno Musings

I will not comment or field questions on who will win the bidding war, but instead I’ll  use this article and 3PAR’s ASIC technology to prove a point.

The eWeek article paints Hitachi as being “old school” implying we are non-competitive in the market today.  Frankly, I find the author, and the expert he cites, as misinformed about Hitachi’s storage offerings and the storage market altogether.  For a little schooling, I suggest a review of the Hitachi blogger presence.  There are many posts on a wide range of topics including storage economics, storage virtualization (hey EMC thanks for copying and re-validating Hitachi), capacity reduction, storage federation, etc.  In my mind, Hitachi is exceedingly innovative in how we approach solving customer problems in the marketplace.

With respect to time to market, I believe that there is a gross misunderstanding about how long it takes for a storage company and their IP to become market ready.  The reality is that 3PAR is an 11 year old company employing ASIC technologies, in fact they presently use their 3rd generation, within their InServe arrays.  They are not alone in being a storage “start-up” with a prolonged gestation.

• BlueArc founded in 1998 and is a 12 year old company
• Pillar Data Systems founded in 2001 and is a 9 year old company
• Compellent founded in 2002 and is a 8 year old company
• Solaris ZFS development broke ground in 2001 and is a 9 year old project
• Data Domain founded in 2001 and is a 9 year old company
• Isilion founded in 2001 and is a 9 year old company

From the information above, the mean vintage of “new” storage projects (e.g. ZFS) or storage start-ups is just shy of a decade at 9.57 years.  The logical question to ask is why?

My answer requires an analogy, and I’m going to use a bank as the example because banks “store” money.  There are a variety of different banks regionally specific, niche, credit unions, etc.  All serve a purpose, but to be a bank there are regulations and unwritten rules. For example, are you going to trust your paycheck to a bank which was just formed in the past 90 days, 1 year, 3 years?  Sure you may have riskier investments within your aggregate portfolio, but for your paycheck?  I know for sure that I won’t risk my paycheck to any old bank.  It needs to be established, it needs to be insured, it needs to have a brand reputation for longevity, and it needs to be mature.

In the same way, I think that for a storage company to gain the status of being a trusted partner, customers entrust their data to, requires many of the same attributes as a bank you deposit your paycheck into: maturity, a brand reputation providing assurance of longevity, etc.  That is why a storage start-up takes around a decade to mature for either purchase or independent success.  It is also why the notion of Hitachi being old school is a specious and misinformed argument in my opinion.

Returning to 3PAR, I want to address a perception in the IT industry, that innovation only exists in software.  While I can understand the attractiveness of this argument, frankly, it does not make any sense to me.  Apparently it does not make any sense to 3PAR either who continues investing in their own ASIC technologies, just like Hitachi does.  Simply put making an ASIC or not, using an ASSP or not, moving a function to software or not is the absolute wrong discussion and point to emphasize.

For all vendors in the market, our arguments center around competitive advantage and the ability to solve problems for our customers.  If that comes in the form of innovative custom hardware and packaging, pure innovative software, or a mixture of the two, then so be it.  Certainly there is a trend present in the industry today of innovating vertically and more recently in value added hardware.  In fact, I was asked a question by the press: can Hitachi continue winning by making R&D investments in innovative hardware, when the industry is largely moving to software?  He said this while writing on an iPad which was custom designed by Apple including Apple’s own A4 silicon.  I pointed this out to him and he said he would hate to play squash with me.  My intention of mentioning the iPad to the reporter was that the market dynamics today on both the consumer side and the enterprise side are rewarding companies — remember the buy price for 3PAR who employs ASICs is billions of dollars — that develop value in any area, hardware included, and vertically integrate.  So is Hitachi old school?  I don’t think so…