StorageNerve

Storage – Utilization, efficiency, cost, dedup, TP, virtualization, ZPR, compression or call it Economics

Devang Panchigar — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:23:31 PDT

There are fundamental concepts of storage Economics, which typically include Thin Provisioning, Deduplication, Zero Page Reclaim, Compression, Reclaimation, Efficiency, Utilization, TCO, ROI, CAPEX, OPEX, etc.

Storage Economics is one of those subjects, everyone likes to hear about, but it’s hard to find it implemented in today’s storage environments.

With that said, a lot of vendors are natively trying to add the concepts of Storage Economics into their storage arrays. With some latest discussions we had with our current visit to Hitachi Japan on the topics of Storage Economics and the core concepts that help customer increase utilization & efficiency in storage environments, here is an attempt to shed some more light on the topic.

We use storage to run our business, to store structured and unstructured data. Data means everything these days. But have we thought about the economics associated with storage?

As consumers, we tend to consume more than necessary at times if we want to have enough buffer, or if we anticipate projected growth, business requirements, customer requirements, technology improvements, and the list goes on. Many vendors these days guarantee 20% more efficiency, 50% less storage, 50% less storage using Thin, etc, etc, etc.

There are several aspects one should consider related to Storage Economics, how your shrinking IT budgets can still meet up with your growing business requirements, and what you can do to keep a balance between both.

With various aspects of Storage Economics below, some may be applicable in the SMB space, some in the enterprise space, and some really at all levels. These may turn into the building blocks of your Storage Economics practice:

It’s important to know what storage you have and where you have it.
Try to move away from fat provisioning to thin provisioning.
Use the concepts of Storage Virtualization to increase efficiency and utilization
Run non-vendor specific SRM (Storage Resource Management) tools for storage optimization and storage management.
Having a storage management tool is a must. You can still perform your daily task using various native element managers.
Industry standard average storage utilization numbers range between 35 to 45%. If you can push your storage utilization numbers higher, it will help you drive the cost down phenomenally.
Implement deduplication; verify your storage array supports deduplication natively. If not, it should be implemented in various parts of your storage like backup, unstructured data, etc.
Run a heterogeneous environment with multiple vendors in it to keep balance relating to price structures.
Though ILM is a forgotten word these days, make sure you run tiering within your storage environment that can help you move your data from higher SLA tiers to lower SLA tiers for cost containment purposes.
Implement storage arrays that natively support Automated Storage Tiering and can automate the movement of data to the required Tiers based on time of the day, policies, spike in usage or business requirements.
If there are native compression technologies available on the Storage Arrays for secondary or backup storage, implement those as a means to reduce your footprint.
Look at extending the life of your storage arrays from a typical 3 years to 6 or 7 years.
Leverage the use of outsourced computing models including Cloud technologies available in the market today. Could be private clouds or public clouds or a mesh of both technologies to reduce the storage footprint and management.
Budget for your storage requirements and try to live by those even if you have to take drastic measures to keep it under control.
Try to gain more operational efficiencies within the storage environments.
Understand the TCO with any new storage purchase, as cost of new storage could include several aspects of implementation including migration, consulting, downtime, missed SLA’s, Training, management, etc.
Try to reclaim storage as old host systems / server systems are retired or migrated.
Check for inconsistencies in your Storage environment as those could result in missed SLA’s, downtime and penalties.
Do not over provision and do not over budget. Its just storage, if you need more you can buy more, but having idle storage doing nothing for years in anticipation of future growth will heavily skew operational storage efficiencies.
Do not create unnecessary storage management tasks and processes for your storage environment.
Having backups and good working backups is very important, but do not tie down your storage with numerous copies of snaps, clones, mirrors, BCV’s, etc for a rainy day, rather have a DR plan and copy single instance of data remotely for DR purposes.
Plot trends for your storage environment. See if trends can help you budget, forecast and provision your storage accurately.
Remember the larger storage footprint you have, the larger your backup footprints will be, causing more storage space, more backup time windows, more network traffic, slower response times, more tapes, more offsite backups, more backup management cost and possibly more licensing cost.
Get away from managing islands of storage; rather move to a more centralized storage management, long-term effects are amazing.
Try to reduce licensing cost around storage software. The less storage you deploy, the less licensing per TB cost that you will pay.

There are many other factors you can implement; here are a few different posts from the past talking about this topic.

http://storagenerve.com/deepdive/storage-optimization/

A Google search on Storage Economics yields

http://www.google.com/search?q=storage+economics&btnG=Search&hl=en&sa=2

There are numerous areas of storage management that customers can try to bring in efficiencies that will help them better manage storage, reduce footprint, and reduce CAPEX and OPEX. It starts as a small practice within organizations and the value it creates grips the rest of the IT management teams.

In large organizations, there are Storage Architecture teams, Deployment teams, Provisioning teams and Operational Support teams, but seldom do we see a Storage Economics Team that helps drive utilization and efficiency through best economic practices within storage environments.

So take this opportunity and plant the seeds for your Storage Economics practice now.

Cheers
@storagenerve

Japan, a country of cultures and so seems Hitachi

Devang Panchigar — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:00:44 PDT

We were invited to go to Japan last week to attend Hitachi’s uValue convention in Tokyo for 4 days.

The Japanese culture is different, very different, but very interesting. No handshakes, you have to bow to people, respected people are called with –San or –Sama after their last names, delicacy food, hot & humid weather, the workplace pride, the dedication to their job, a very hardworking society, very modest, humble and honestly one of the best hosts, these were just some observations.

Things are different, very different…………..…and in middle of that you got a company called HDS, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Japan that is located in the US. All HDS executives are from the US, while practically everyone on Hitachi’s Executive team is from Japan.

Does it mean, A clash of cultures? Absolutely not……. we rather felt the other way around. The new Executive team within HDS is establishing great relations with their counterparts in Hitachi Japan, enabling a lot of HDS decisions being made locally.

Hitachi CEO, Nakanishi-San went through an hour of speech to the attendees at the uValue convention, there were 50K attendees, out of which 10K were at his speech. He went through the last 100 years of Hitachi innovation and set the stage for the next 10 years of focus.

Hitachi is truly a part of the Japanese culture, as you land at Narita Airport in Tokyo and go through escalators and elevators, you will notice the Hitachi brand. From making the first battery in Japan to making fans, turbines, refrigerators, trains, televisions, they made it all and they still make it all. Talk about IT floors in datacenters, Hitachi is always found in form of Symphony Servers or USPV Storage or Hitachi networking. Every major place you walk into, you will atleast see a thing or two made by Hitachi.

First Hitachi Product Ever

A Battery

A Turbine?

FAN

Telegraph

Disk Drive

So far I thought Hitachi Japan made great storage technology and its US wing HDS marketed it. But after seeing the interaction last week, my opinions about the whole relationship between Hitachi Japan and HDS have now changed. HDS seems to help Hitachi Japan with a lot of strategic direction in terms of products and services.

Some More details

Both Hitachi and HDS have been great hosts to the bloggers and the analyst invited to this event. All the way from making sure the logistics of the trip including flights, food, travel, events and local trips were very well organized.

Attendees included (Bloggers): (FRONT – Left to Right) Myself, Robin Harris, Nigel Poulton, (BACK – Left to Right) Chris Evans, Greg Knieriemen, Rick Vanover.

Some activities included

Sunday – Monday: Flying for the better part of the day and losing another 13 hours going there….. pretty much left with only Monday evening for dinner with HDS folks.

Tuesday: Visited Hitachi RSD facilities in Odawara (a suburb of Tokyo). Took the Bullet Train to cover this 70 mile trip, in about 15/20 mins. This train was amazing, the top speed varies upto 200 miles/hour.

The Bullet Train, made by Hitachi

Spend the entire day talking about some NDA stuff. It was very interesting, very interesting guys that work on these sophisticated projects. Went out to dinner with Hitachi executives that night and enjoyed some of the finest food in the world with a 7 course dinner and 6 different wines and sake.

Wednesday: Spend pretty much half a day talking to HDS about some strategy, some really creative discussions about technology and marketing.

Spend the rest of the day in Akihabara, which is the electronics district of Tokyo. Imagine a geek store, here there were hundred’s of them, from small shops to mega stores selling just electronic items.

Nigel Poulton

Rick Vanover, Chris Evans

Met up with some other HDS folks (Professional Services and Managed Services) that evening who were visiting Hitachi Japan from the US. It was great to connect with them.

Thursday: Early morning left for the #uValue convention. Great Place, you can catch some of those pictures on the Facebook page, here.

Hearing the CEO of Hitachi and then Iwata-San in a private meeting with the Press, Bloggers and Analyst, topics were around Hitachi’s strategy about IT and Telecommunications. Attended the Michael Hay session on Hitachi Research Strategy and then headed out for dinner. It was absolutely impressive to see the Convention floor with Hitachi Technologies and then hear about some of the strategy behind it.

Hitachi CEO - Nakanishi-San

Hitachi Executive for IT, Telecommunications, Iwata-San

Hitachi Robot at uValue Convention: EMIEW from storagenerve on Vimeo.

Then was dinner that night in Roppongi, a suburb of Tokyo (it’s the night life district of Tokyo). Had a great time with Hitachi executives from Communication and Engineering both joining with us for dinner.

Then we were given a tour of the 10^th tallest building in Japan called the Roppongi Hills, at the 52^nd floor lobby overlooking Tokyo. We had a great time there. After a long and tiring day, sit at the 52^nd floor overlooking Tokyo and having a glass of beer, a great feeling.

The Gang: Bloggers and Hitachi (Meade-San and Cecilia)

Another interesting fact: The Dinner table every night had a sitting scheme, where every person was assigned a chair/seat and that created a nice mix of environments where on each table there would be a blogger, analyst, HDS and Hitachi person. Quite enjoyable to hear different perspective of things.

Friday: It was the day we were all leaving. Finished up some early AM shopping and headed to the airport for a long 24 hour bus, plane, train, plane and car journey back home via Houston.

Uneventful trip back home….

I will end with this; the Japanese know how to take care of their guest. Culturally Japan seems to be a very strong country, Hitachi is a large part of that culture. Syyonara for now….

Thanks Hitachi and HDS for inviting and making us feel part of the family..

Cheers
@storagenerve

Disclaimer: The 4 day trip to Hitachi Japan to attend the uValue Convention is sponsored by HDS. They paid for all travel, boarding and lodging expenses for these days. The attendees / bloggers are not required to Blog about this event. This is my attempt to share what we learned there.

Storage Federation

Devang Panchigar — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:46:25 PDT

VPLEX and USPV

EMC’s latest addition to the concept of storage federation is the VPLEX announcement that happened at EMC World 2010. VPLEX comes in two forms today, VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro. Important features of VPLEX include cache coherency, distributed data and active-active clusters at metro distances. In the works are VPLEX Geo and VPLEX Global enabling inter-continental distances.

VPLEX contains no drives today, it is based on a version of Linux Open Source and runs on the same hardware as a VMAX engine. But said that, what prevents EMC from including VPLEX as part of every VMAX and Clariion sold today or may be just run it as a Virtual Appliance within the VMAX (Enginuity) or Clariion (Flare).

While HDS has a slightly different approach yielding almost the same result using Storage Virtualization, HDS approaches storage federation in its USPV platform. The USPV scales upto synchronous distances, I believe 100 kms max distance today.

USPV natively uses a combination of Universal Volume Manager (UVM), High Availability Manager (HAM), Dynamic Replicator, Hitachi TrueCopy Remote Replication and Hitachi Replication Manager to do synchronous distance (100 kms) replication with distributed data in an active-active clustered environment.

VPLEX local and VPLEX metro has been recent announcements, while the USPV has been offering similar features since the past few years now.

Use-Case

Service providers will be largest customers while the VPLEX is still being developed in the Geo and Global modes.

I would think, government customers like DISA, DoD and other cloud providers in the federal space may find VPLEX and USPV very interesting as well.

Migrations using both the VPLEX Local and USPV are a piece of cake, because of its underlying features.

And many more…

Future

Will the future of all storage subsystems have federation in it as a core component? It is most likely with virtualization technologies being designed and pushed today, that we will natively see some of these features into backend storage that can typically hold data in containers and these containers move based on requirements. Look at a VM as a container of information or application.

With a Front-end storage controller, call it a VPLEX or a USPV which doesn’t care what sort of disks are sitting behind it, natively add all storage features to it like snaps, clones, RAID, replication, high availability, virtualization and it doesn’t matter if you use the cheapest storage disk behind it.

Typically with a single storage subsystem, you are looking at scaling your storage to 600 drives or 2400 drives or 4096 drives or 8192 drives or 16384 drives max or does it even matter at this point.

Storage federation will allow a system to scale upto 100’s of PB of storage, for example a EMC VPLEX scales upto 8192 Volumes today, while a USPV scales upto 247PB’s of storage, in essence that is 1 TB x 592,000 disk drives in a single system (federated).

When you connect two of these VPLEX’s or two of the USPV’s at synchronous distances, you now start taking advantage of active-active clusters (datacenters) with distributed data. (Again I will be the first to say, I am not sure how much of cache coherency is built within the USPV today).

But that brings us to some important questions…

Questions

Is storage federation that important?

Is storage federation the future of all storage?

Do you care about active-active datacenters?

What is the use-case for federation outside of service providers?

Will this technology shape the future of how we do computing today by leveraging and pooling storage assets together for a higher availability and efficiency?

How large, a single namespace would you like to have? I believe HP IBRIX brings a similar concept of scaling storage to 16PB’s total in a single name space..

Does federation add latency, which limits its usage to only certain applications?

Is VPLEX the future of all EMC storage controller technology, and will that eliminate the Flare or Enginuity code?

If you add a few disk drives to the VPLEX locally, can it serve high demand IOPS applications?

How large will cache get on these storage controllers to minimize the impact of latency and cache coherency on devices at synchronous distances? Is PAM or Flash Cache that answer?

At that point, does it matter if you can do coupling on your systems to extend it like we initially thought the VMAX would have 16 or 32 engines or may be you can couple Clariion SP’s or AMS or USPV’s?

More Questions

Will the future VPLEX look like a USPV with local disk drives attached?

Though the big vision of VPLEX is Global replication creating active – active datacenters, does the next generation VBlocks meant for Service Provider market include a VPLEX natively within it?

Is EMC Virtual Storage just catching upto HDS technology? Or is VPLEX vision a big and unique one that will change the direction of EMC Storage in the future…

Is Storage federation game changing and is EMC ahead of HDS or HDS ahead of EMC…

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), the super secret technology company

Devang Panchigar — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:06:29 PDT

When was the last time you got into a conversation with an HDS employee on Twitter or an HDS PR person engaged with you or you saw a blog post from anyone outside the HDS executive team or an HDS employee blogging outside the HDS domain name.

When was the last time you saw a HDS executive at a large storage / virtualization show or VMUG? Does HDS host any storage shows (technology forums). When was the last time you engaged in a conversation with an HDS employee about HDS vs competition products.

Hitachi uValue Convention 2010, Celebrating 100th year Anniversary of Hitachi

Culture

HDS marketing approach has been super secret so far. HDS is quite a bit influenced by its parent company Hitachi Ltd, Japan, where typically marketing seems to be quite conservative. Hitachi Ltd is a 100 Billion dollar company, doing business in most of the world. The Japanese are very modest and focus on engineering and not on product marketing.

Hitachi hardly talks about its own success, when asked a Hitachi executive on how HDS influences IT within Hitachi and how it helps drive more efficiency into Hitachi, the executive was very modest about it.

Today

But said that, things are now changing. From what we saw and learnt about HDS a month ago at the HDS Geek Day 0.9 in Santa Clara and this week at Hitachi in Japan at the research labs and the uValue convention, now its pretty apparent that HDS is changing how it does marketing and focuses on product and datacenter strategy.

There is a list put together by HDSCorp on twitter with all twitter users from HDS

http://twitter.com/HDScorp/hdsers/members

A few HDS executives also blog at the HDS Blogs site

http://blogs.hds.com/

Tomorrow

We saw some really new focus areas in terms of marketing within HDS. This is the changing side of the company.

A few things HDS should do, allow blogging outside the HDS domain, follow and create some unique marketing efforts to drive the messaging internally within HDS, internally to Hitachi and externally to customers and social media folks. Get more HDS folks on Twitter and other social media channels.

One thing we know, the new executive team within HDS is very aggressive and wants to make a difference. This was very visible at the HDS Geek Day 0.9 and this week in Japan where HDS is really pushing Hitachi engineering with new product innovation and product strategy.

Hitachi has a ton of datacenter products, as Nigel Poulton points out in one of his Blog post about Hitachi Networking, some of these products are so successful in the Japanese market, but never even make it to the rest of the world.

The big vision story is missing. Its not about one datacenter product like storage, its about how every component in the puzzle can help customers drive more efficiency within datacenters.

Its wait and watch, but what we saw over the past month, I can say, HDS is rolling their sleeves ….. and getting ready…..

Disclaimer: The 4 day trip to Hitachi Japan to attend the uValue Convention was sponsored by HDS. They paid for all Travel, Boarding and lodging expenses for these days. The attendees / bloggers are not required to Blog about this event. This is my attempt to share what we learned there.

Hitachi uValue Convention

Devang Panchigar — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 01:16:56 PDT

I have been able to travel to many parts of the world over the past few years either through work or personally, but this will be my first trip to Japan. I am very excited to go to Japan, but more excitement is the reason to go there.

We will be attending the uValue Convention, Celebrating 100^th Year Anniversary of Hitachi (parent company of HDS – Hitachi Data Systems). Hitachi’s Global network contains more than 1000 different companies, 400K employees, 100 Billion dollars plus in revenues.

A company that is diversified into making many infrastructure products including train, televisions, heavy equipment, etc. As we landed on the Tokyo airport, the Hitachi brand started to become so much more visible from seeing elevators to escalators to conveyor belts and so forth. They also make storage.

About 4 weeks ago we were invited to attend the HDS bloggers day in Santa Clara, CA. It was an awesome event and gave us a peek into Hitachi Storage products. Tried some live blogging there from those sessions and enjoyed it. You can find more about the trip to HDS Geek Day, here.

This week is not about HDS but about Hitachi. The storage products they make and the thinking, strategy, direction and players behind it.

This is a bloggers and analyst event, though the bloggers and analyst are not preview to the same data and will be attending different sessions and technology briefings.

As for the high level agenda, here are a few things we are planning to do.

Tuesday:

Trip to Odawara to meet Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems executives and take a deepdive into Hitachi Storage Products. There seems to be a day full of technology chat about various Hitachi storage products.

Wednesday:

Meeting with HDS executives and discussions on various Hitachi Storage platforms.

Thursday:
Attend uValue Convention celebrating the 100^th year anniversary of Hitachi Ltd Japan.

Friday:

Some sightseeing and then fly back home

Attendees:

The following are the attendees (bloggers) to the event; non of these guys need any introductions, you all know them. I am really glad to be part of this team.

Rick Vanover
@RickVanover
rickvanover.com
.
Robin Harris
@StorageMojo
storagemojo.com

Will try to stay connected on Twitter (hashtag #uValue) and update the Blog as frequently as I get a chance to do so. There will be some embargo and NDA information that will not make it to the blog and twitter.

Many critics that talk about the fact that HDS is purely a marketing arm of Hitachi Japan with no leverage on Hitachi Storage products. Hope to see all this is false and HDS has much deeper roots into Hitachi Japan in terms of product direction and strategy.

Stay tuned, more updates coming soon..!!!

Should I already be learning some Japanese, Konnichi wa (Hello!!)

Disclaimer: The 4 day trip to Hitachi Japan to attend the uValue Convention is sponsored by HDS. They paid for all Travel, Boarding and lodging expenses for these days. The attendees / bloggers are not required to Blog about this event. This is my attempt to share what we learned there.

Having lots of fun….

Devang Panchigar — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:31:59 PDT

My sudden disappearance and appearance in twitterosphere and blogosphere has got people in social media to ask me as to what am I up to these days. My honest answer to them is “I am having lots of fun…”

About a couple of months ago, I was offered a new role in the current organization I work for. For the past 5 years or so, I was solely focused on Storage platforms. To our customers we offer infrastructure services, managed services, professional services, outsourcing and asset management. For these years growing the storage, systems, networking and virtualization portfolios was the key to our success.

These days it’s about working with the whole stack of products. As much as we talk about convergence within datacenter products, services convergence is at the heart of it. Typical organizations are structured to support products based on silos, with the changing landscape, it’s important to start thinking about services in similar ways.

As part of business transformation a need for a new thinking is required. In just a short duration of time, along with a group of very talented individuals we formed a small team that attacks these issues through out the business, we call it the TigerTeam and by the way, we are recruiting for it. From creating cross platform training to cross platform support to selling a whole stack of services associated with convergence is the focus.

Along with the business transformation on the customer side (external), comes a lot of internal transformation related to how we do business, growth plans, focus, internal strategies, social media, marketing, etc. A total revamp of internal IT resources that would drive more efficiency through out the organization is required. Right from using cloud based services for IT infrastructure to using CRM solutions that are cloud based has helped us to be more efficient.

Revamping as to how we do logistics to how we manage customer service to identifying new potential growth markets are some very key focus points of our future strategy and growth plans. At the heart of this sits R&D efforts, training and knowledge sharing.

One thing that has come to realization is, SUCCESS AS A WHOLE IS IMPORTANT, not just small teams individually achieving success in an organization. Solo and Silo successes create an inequality with total business growth. Success ‘WE’ is important than success ‘I’.

Just in this short duration, we have managed to kickoff some 10’s of new projects that will help us be more aggressive with achieving our business goals. With some very unique approaches, we are trying to change the way we think and we do business.

But it’s has been great fun and I am loving every moment of it. It may mean I might be a bit irregular with new blog posts, but at the center of this, the experience we are getting is phenomenal, the team we are building is incredible and the new thinking we are bringing will help us go far ways.

Want to make a difference…. And want to be part of this dynamic team, feel free to shoot me an email at devang at storagenerve dot com.

Cheers
@storagenerve

HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) Bloggers Day: Session 4 (Live Blogging)

Devang Panchigar — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:53:09 PDT

This is an attempt to live blog at the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Bloggers Day: Session 4

Day 2:

Pete Gerr, Director, Strategic and Solutions Marketing

8:30: Kickoff…

8:31: HDS going through parking lot questions…some will be answered today, some later on one on one discussions.

Michael Hay, Senior Director, Product Strategy

8:40: John Deere is owned by Hitachi..

8:40 tons of tweets out there…..Nigel wins the award for the MVP and Devang wins the best dressed…..

8:41: Hitachi Research can be found at http://www.hitachi.com/rd

8:42: Even though HDS is moving into this arena, we are using HDS proxy servers to connect to the internet from here, the HDS Geek website is blocked internally. Here is the site that HDS might want to consider to open http://hds.com/go/geekday/index.html

8:45: High level Hitachi (not HDS) Vision, Strategy.

8:45: Gazopa.com another visual search engine

8:50: RAID discussion kicked off by Nigel Poulton and its getting quite interesting…

Claus Mikkelsen, Chief Strategist

Mark Adams, Senior Product Marketing Manager

9:12: Storage Tiering discussion

9:15: AMS discussion

9:16: HDS midtier storage (AMS) has explosive growth over the last 2 years….

9:20 AMS was released in 2008 and has been doing great…

9:30 ……

9:55: LUN Ownership and Failover question from yesterday

9:56: THere is LUN ownership on either Controller 0 and controller 1. Active – Active cluster, I/O and architectural diagram.

10:00 Break……but a big discussion on the AMS architecture (current) and potentials in the future….

XXXXX,xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx

10:20: Embargo session

11:00 Round table discussion….for another hour.

Disclaimer: Though we are not required, it is up to the attendees to blog and tweet about this event if they wish to. Our travel, boarding and lodging expenses for two days will be paid by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Bloggers Day: Session 3 (live blogging)

Devang Panchigar — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:23:24 PDT

This is an attempt to live blog at the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Bloggers Day: Session 3

John Harker: Product Marketing, HDP, Virtualization products and stragegy

John Yarborough: Technical Ops

Larry Korbus: Product Manager, Array Based Virtualization

11:32: USP and USP V storage arrays, external storage

11:33: Tiering within Arrays (using Tiering models like Tier 1, Tier 2, TIer 3, Tier 4) and external storage.

11:34: All the above is done through using Storage Virtualization using the storage virtualization layer that will help extend the life of legacy arrays.

11:44: Dynamic Provisioning is applicable both on the USP and the AMS platforms

11: 45: Simple Provisioning, capacity leveling, automated performance optimization, performance, load balancing, reclamation, savings related to replication, IT agility, reduce OPEX and CAPEX

11:48: HDP is included in AMS but is chargeable on the USP

11:55: Zero Page reclaim discussion.

11:57: Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning also uses Symantec Storage Foundation, VxFS. Cleaning filesystems

11:47: All questions related to Zero Page reclaim, HDP, external storage

12:11: White board session related HDP, External storage, storage virtualization

12:14: HDS denotes Cache in an array as $ (Cash)

12:15: These sessions are quite technical, very interesting, white boards

12:16: USPV does add latency to IO, though measurable very little

12:17: Hitachi Device Manager demo

12:30: I am loving this…demo

—-

1:00 to 2:15: Did an infosmack podcast with Greg Kneireimen, Hu Yoshida, Nigel Poulton

Miki Sandorfi, Chief Strategist, File, Content and Cloud

Linda Xu, Senior Director, File, Content and Cloud

Missed most of this session, this was a great session on UCP (Universal Compute Platform), I wish someone recorded this

2:25: Talking about Orchestration layer on the UCP

2:30: Networking partner has not been disclosed yet……..BUT THINK OF IT AS…..

2:45: Lots of questions on UCP…..lots of answers on UCP, good discussion

2:46: Orchestration is provided using Microsoft Systems Manager and Virtual machine manager

2:47: A bit of comparison to VBlocks, some questions asked.

259: Integration platform to enable cloud like services for private cloud, public clouds, storage as a service, infrastructure as a service, orchestration, tiering using existing Hitachi Storage technologies.

3:06: Real life experience unified IT and how customers are driving more efficiency into organization and how they are managing to use automation.

3:15: Demo of the Unified Compute Platform Orchestration software

3:30 Lab tour now….and no pictures…

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Bloggers Day: Session 2 (live blogging)

Devang Panchigar — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:17:45 PDT

This is an attempt to live blog at the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Bloggers Day. Session 2

Hu Yoshida, CTO Hitachi Data Systems

The technical discussion kicks off….video coming soon….

9:56: Common platform for all data, Storage Virtualization

9:57: Storage Virtualization requirements including applications, multitenancy, scalability, transparency, etc.

9:59: Storage Virtualization in-band, out-of-band vs USPV

10:01:Dynamically provision new services in seconds

10:02: Convert fat volumes into thin volumes by moving them into the pool

10:03: Optimize storage performance by spreading the I/O across more arms

10:04: Safe Multitenancy architecture

10:10: Application Transparency, Hitachi Command Portal. SLA’s, Allocation, etc, can be customized here, for could providers.

10:11: SCALE UP and SCALE OUT are important on storage platforms

Michael Hay, Chief Strategist, Strategic Product Operations and Planning

10:15: Waiting for the virtualization circle

10:18: Deepdive into HDS’s thought process and startegy….(it is hard to capture all the thoughts)

Michael Heffernan: Solutions Product Manager, Server Virtualization

10:28: Topics around Hypervisor, impact to customers, hypervisors and storage, options around vmware, hyper-v, hds

10: 29: Hitachi has very strong set of hardware storage products

10:34: Hitachi changing messaging around hypervisor and going back to the basics to understand the HCP and Vmware IO stacks. Hitachi is closing at it very closely.

10:46: Vmware strategy: to reduce impact on the host we do Active Active Symmetric clusters on modular arrays (AMS platform), so we dont need powerpath like software’s.

10:47: Chris Evans USP ness moment…

10:48: HDP: Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, wide stripe, vm extends, vmfs volumes. Sub Lun level locking of USP LUNs with HAM coming soon…

10:55: Scalability discussion

11:11: AMS disscussion for small to medium businesses. HDS also has a hypervisor modeling and sizing tool that customers can use.

11:16: HDS is completely agnostics on hypervisors.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Bloggers Day: Session 1 (live blogging)

Devang Panchigar — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:45:07 PDT

This is an attempt to live blog at the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Bloggers Day.

Session 1

8:00: Hitachi Welcome

Pete Gerr, Director Strategic and Solutions Marketing

8:25: Hitachi’s Global Presence, Europe, Americas, Asia, Japan, many other countries.

8:26: More than 1000 Companies Globally, 400,000 employees globally, 100Billion in Revenue

8:30: Introductions

8:31: Nigel introduces himself as “I am Nigel Poulton” and pauses for a few secs… a chuckle in the room…the troublemaker

8:32: Rick Vanover, Chris Evans, Devang Panchigar, Nigel Poulton, Simon Long, Bas Raayman, Greg Knieriemen, Phil, Paul Miller, Elias Klnaser

8:33: Michael, Hu, Pete, Claus, Harry, Carli and many more from the Hitachi Team

8:34: HDS is part of a larger organization Hitachi

8:35: Retelling the HDS Storage

8:40: Data drives our world and information is the new currency

8:42: Unified Management, Common Platform, Virtualized Infrastructure irrelevant of structured, unstructured data.

Claus Mikklesen, Chief Scientist

8:45: Claus shows a picture of the first hard drive from 1956, 24 platters, 2100 pounds

8:50: Nigel kicks off a nice discussion on Software platforms within HDS, VP of Software platforms jumps in, Pete and Michael talks about software platforms

Harry ZImmer, Senior Director, Global Competitive Marketing

Mandy Perera, Senior Competitive Market Analyst

8:55: Competitive discussion kickoff

9:00: Hot Topic: Dynamic/Auto Tiering of Storage, top on the list

9:01: Hot Topic: Cloud Evolution: Customer adoption, Private-Hybrid-Public Clouds, second on the list

9:02: Hot Topic: Simplified/Comprehensive Storage Mgmt, third on the list

9:06: Thin provisioning was a request that was submitted and HDS managed to deliver on it through this new process

9:08: Harry Zimmer works at HDS, but before that worked for EMC and IBM.

9:20: Elias has deployed Hitachi Blades and loves it. Has some vmware integration issues with loading drives etc.

9:31: We have been storage virtualization for years when compared to Vplex

9:32: Lets find out implementation and application needs for long distance storage virtualization and see if there are existing products within HDS that might be able to accomplish it.

9:34: Containers, POD’s, Racks and End to End Stacks: Biz Dev Wars, was on top of the list but has now fallen to 15 now. This is a comparison to vBlocks. The question is how successful is EMC is in this strategy.