Tony's Blog Bytes

Another great discussion with an HDS customer - David Shepherd, co-founder of Exacent.

Tony Asaro: What does Exacent do?

David Shepherd: We provide an Enterprise-class infrastructure available for small, medium business, all the way up to an Enterprise customer that is looking for a disaster recovery offering, and/or a completely outsourced data center. And we can do that with virtualization, and specifically we can do that by utilizing the USP V in the products and services that are available within that platform to leverage our technology.

Tony Asaro: Why did you decide to implement the Hitachi USP V?

David Shepherd: When we built the business and built the business model and knew where we wanted to go, we knew we wanted to differentiate ourselves from the other providers in the space. The best way to do that was with the backend infrastructure, again the Enterprise-class - the Fortune 50 class of equipment that we have. When we did that we evaluated the top three providers in the space, IBM, EMC, and Hitachi. Did a bakeoff between those three - came down between EMC and Hitachi - and eventually selected Hitachi based on really two primary differences. and that was the I/O capability of the USP V as well as the virtualization capability that the USP V had at that time, and that EMC did not. As well as the fact that the [Hitachi] virtualization was established by Hitachi, and had a much stronger history of success.

Tony Asaro: Can you give us examples of how the Hitachi USP V provided real value to your company?

David Shepherd: For our company being that we are a managed service provider and hosting provider - the USP V is really our core - it’s the backend. With the architecture of our solution - the USP V is really the core of our solution, - all of the data, all of the OS, all of the information resides on the USP V. It really is the heart and soul of our organization. From a process standpoint we can provide our customers with just about every effective strategy - whether it’s consolidation, data migration, disaster recovery, performance, etc., we really liked.

Being in the space and in terms of being in the cloud computing - one of the cloud computing benefits is efficiency, green IT - USP V allows us to provide that to our customers - to provide all of the benefits to organizations that normally might not be able to leverage that level of efficiency and performance. We’re able to provide that to our customers which obviously enables us to leverage that for our business.

Tony Asaro: How has the Hitachi USP V improved on the overall economic effectiveness within your IT operations?

David Shepherd: Competitively when we go to market and get into a bakeoff with any of our competitors, and we get down to what’s really on the backend of the services that we’re providing, I send out the white papers, I send out the performance, I send out the architecture of the platform. It has a direct impact on our ability to win business. When we’re competing with direct attached storage, low end SAN storage, even some of the higher end products - when we go head to head - we can show them the history of virtualization, the history of performance, the I/O capabilities, etc. It gives us a dramatic ability to win the business.

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There is a ton of hype around cloud computing - however - Exacent is providing Enterprise Cloud Computing services to its customers by leveraging the Hitach USP V and its external storage virtualization capability.