HDS hopes you will attend our many speaking sessions. They include a joint SAP-HDS Big Data Session Wednesday, 16 May / 12:00 – 12:40 pm in the Partner Theater. We will also be co-presenting with SAP/HP and Cisco: Wednesday, May 16 / 3:00 – 3:45 PM at the D&T/ HANA Campus. This session will cover an overview of Hardware Appliances Options Optimized for SAP HANA Microforum. Hitachi Consulting will also be speaking on Tuesday, May 15 / 11:00 – 11:45am in the partner center. The topic will be SAP HANA-enabled Next-generation Market Responsiveness for CPG Companies. This exciting subject should generate a lot of discussions.

Please come visit us at the HDS Booth #1063 and in the SAP Test Drive area. There will be lots of action, giveaways, frequent mini stage presentations and active informative discussions!

Don’t forget to us on twitter @hdscorp and @tdoyle49.

Check our QR code microsite http://qr.hds.com/sapphire.

In October 2011, we announced our 3-tier strategy—starting from infrastructure cloud to provide more dynamic infrastructure, then layering content cloud to enable more fluid content, and then finally building to information cloud to facilitate more sophisticated insight. You can read more about that here.

Today’s Hitachi Unified Storage announcement supports our vision by providing a platform that underpins it, granting customers unified and seamless access to all resources, data, content and information. This unified architecture provides a single pool, so that the whole capacity can be managed from one place, improving utilization, simplifying management and lowering costs for our customers. To achieve this, we are bringing to market a unified platform, as well as a unique, extensible management framework to provide a single way to store, manage and protect all data: block, file and object.

Now, in order to manage the massive growth of information, with limited resources all while bubbling up the trends and insights gleaned across previously siloed datasets, it’s critical to free data from its originating application and underlying media. This is where object storage comes in (enter Hitachi Content Platform – HCP). HCP provides a different way of storing information. It stores information as objects, which is the data, plus metadata (data that describes the data itself). This approach unleashes a whole host of interesting things that can be done with that data. For example, the management of that data can be automated based on what the data is, how it was created, who created it, who can access it, what service levels should be assigned, how it should be protected, when it should be deleted, and the list goes on and on. This also means we can index, search and discover across all data within the object store. This is critical to finding data for insight, reuse and action.

Today’s content cloud announcement includes new features across Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Data Ingestor as well as a new Content Audit service. The new capabilities provide greater scale within a singular architecture with significant increases in tenants and namespaces, storage density and broad protocol support, more granular visibility and control by providing more intelligent queriability of the data, along with more comprehensive access controls and finally improved operational efficiency achieved through support of spin down, simplified installation, enhanced monitoring and online upgrades. These new features and enhancements are targeted towards customers looking to centralize the data within their organization, within remote or branch offices, or service providers looking for a robust foundation in which to build and deliver their own reliable and profitable cloud services.

This is indeed an exciting set of announcements, enhancements and introductions, but don’t just take my word, take a look at the details of what’s included in unified, covered by Hu Yoshida here, and more to come on HCP/HDI from Michael Hay and Ken Wood, stay tuned!

The tight integration of IT with business is essential for the success of any modern organization. In fact, ESG research (subscription required) indicates that organizations use business process improvements as the top justification for IT purchases, beating out OPEX and CAPEX concerns.

This is reflective of organizations moving to highly virtualized and dynamic environments (clouds – private or public) to better serve the business. More and more, the CIO is looking for efficient problem resolution and is becoming a broker of IT services, balancing speed and agility with security and control when deploying new applications. Typically, this requires less architecting, designing and testing of numerous disparate pieces and more about deploying solutions that can rapidly scale to meet the needs of the business.

Converged data center solutions can play a big role in helping organizations accelerate the time to value and still maintain control. These are solutions that combine virtualization, compute, network, storage and management to provide a solution for enterprises and service providers. Typically, these infrastructures are used to create a foundation beyond simple consolidation and cost containment. More specifically, solutions like virtual desktop environments, server virtualization efforts and even business critical applications are becoming common–essentially they enable organizations to build out a private cloud environment. Again, ESG research confirms the need for solutions like these as survey respondents report that increasing the use of server virtualization, desktop virtualization and private cloud computing all rank in the top 10 for 2012 IT initiatives. ESG has seen further evidence at end-user events, more information can be found on the New England VMUG site.

While business process improvement is critical, organizations do not have unlimited budgets, so in many cases they have to work within the confines of existing infrastructure to create these private cloud infrastructures. Therefore, the ability to create a private cloud leveraging existing server, network and storage should be appealing as well. This requires more of an open model capable of integrating and orchestrating industry standard infrastructure to enable an end-to-end solution.

HDS has a range of converged data center solutions designed to automate, simplify and accelerate the adoption of cloud computing. The company’s objective is to provide solutions that enable faster deployment, automation and scalability to help organizations adopt cloud infrastructures at a pace that works for them, with predictable results and faster time to value. These converged solutions help eliminate some of the roadblocks to private cloud deployments that come from a lack of infrastructure standards, expertise and best practices. HDS vision includes three levels of solutions:

• Level 1: Reference architectures – designed for key applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Oracle as well as virtualized environments such as Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud and VMware. Currently includes Hitachi Solutions Based on Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track.
• Level 2: Hardware integration – solution specific, validated bundles of integrated hardware platforms. Hitachi Converged Platform for Exchange is one example.
• Level 3: Management integration – orchestrating various components across the boundaries of technology domains. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform enables organizations to leverage multi-vendor or existing hardware.

Regardless of the path taken, organizations are in the process of transforming their environments to better respond to the needs to the business. HDS offers multiple paths that can help organizations achieve the desired end state, a private cloud infrastructure, at their own pace and budget.

For more on this topic, check out this white paper and video.

Our focus at #SNWusa is “The New Data Center Economy”. You can find us in booth #201. The HDS booth will showcase virtualization,  capacity efficiency, big data, file & content, and cloud solutions, and feature a Technical Operations kiosk with a VSP and demos.

During the four-day conference I will be in the booth, meeting with customers, and presenting on “HDS cloud at your own pace”. I am excited to meet with people to talk about what is relevant to their business data center challenges. There will be fun giveaways and a lot of action in our booth.  Look for my tweets for #HDS and #SNWusa news and fun!  Follow me at @tdoyle49

And don’t forget to go see my colleague Fred Oh (@fredhds on Twitter) for his Big Data session (details below).

Remember everything is bigger in Texas

Main highlights of HDS participation include:

• Main stage presentation “The New Data Center Economy”  by Michael Gustafson, Senior Vice President, Global File & Content Solutions Business, Hitachi Data Systems on Tuesday, April 3 at 10:00am – 10:30am
• 5 Solution Provider sessions to include:
• Big Data Track: Big Data, Big Content, and Aligning Your Storage Strategy: Fred Oh, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, File, Content & Cloud Portfolio, Hitachi Data Systems, on Monday 4/2: 1:00 pm – 1:45 pm. Fred’s presentation is embedded below
  Big Data, Big Content, and Aligning Your Storage Strategy

  View more presentations from Hitachi Data Systems
• SNIA Tutorial: The Evolution of File Systems: Thomas Rivera, Sr. Technical Associate, File, Content & Cloud Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems, on Tuesday 4/3: 3:05 pm – 3:50 pm.
• Cloud Storage Track: A Hype Free Stroll through Cloud Storage Security: Eric Hibbard, CTO Security & Privacy, Hitachi Data Systems, on Wednesday 4/4: 11:40 am – 12:25 pm.
• Data Management Track: Advanced Data Reduction Concepts: Thomas Rivera, Sr. Technical Associate, File, Content & Cloud Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems & Gene Nagle, Manager, Applications Engineering,
• Storage Systems, Exar Corporation on Wednesday 4/4: 11:40 am – 12:25 pm.
• Data Security Track: Storage Security – The ISO/IEC Standard: Eric Hibbard, CTO Security & Privacy, Hitachi Data Systems, on Thursday 4/5: 8:30 am – 9:15 am.

Will we see you there? What questions or specific issues would like me to addresses?

After a relaxing break for the holidays, Storage Visions 2012 was a great way to ease back into the swing of things. Sure, many people might not look at a whirlwind trip to a Las Vegas-based conference kicking off CES (the world’s largest consumer technology show of the year) “easing back in,” but well…I do.

SV2012 starts a few days before CES, so there is somewhat of a quiet before the storm. I love the feel of Storage Visions; it has an intimate feel even though the attendance continues to grow each year. This is due to Tom Coughlin and his team. They run the conference like a community. I see many familiar faces each year and there is a heavy emphasis on networking with your peers. Networking is made easy with the laid back atmosphere at the conference, and with all the friendly exchanges, it is very easy to meet new contacts and get excited about what you do. Our HDS cloud vision really seemed to resonate with the people I talked with.

I was able to present during the session “They’re Out There: Opportunities and Challenges for Consumer and Enterprise Cloud Storage”. What a fun panel session it was. It included a variety of presenters (even a competitor), but it was such a lively interactive exchange that it made for an interesting and informative discussion. The session focused on distributing content, as well as how on-line back-up and disaster recovery are driving demand for remote storage. We also addressed storage requirements and trends for online content delivery and remote storage. We covered some new business opportunities and how they’ll impact the growth and use of storage in this growing market.

Another thing that made SV 2012 a bigger and better event this year, for me and HDS: Hitachi Content Platform (HCP)was honored with a Visionary Product Award at the 2012. HDS was recognized in the Enabling Professional Storage Technology category for the benefits HCP brings to organizations, including simplified IT, reduced costs and reduced risks. I swear I thought I was accepting an Oscar! A little too excited maybe? Oh well, a little too much excitement won’t kill anyone.

That’s how I started off my New Year . I know it will be an exciting year here at HDS. I look forward to spreading the HDS cloud vision and continuing to share the many exciting things we have going on!

Follow me on twitter @tdoyle49

For me, those conversations usually include discussing and recommending favorite books as a way to share what’s been useful for us. Since recommendations from people with similar interests are usually more helpful, below are my book recommendations from 2011—not all are new–for those that want to be a geek but really aren’t. (You know who you are…or you know who those people in your life are. We might love the idea of fractals and quantum mechanics…but we can’t do math in our heads.)

Title: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Author: James Gleick (@JamesGleick)

About: A historical perspective of information.

Why read it?

It’s a beautifully written study of information as its own historical topic, which I haven’t seen anyone else do.

Gleick does a wonderful job explaining some very difficult concepts and I love the history of great discoveries, Even more impressive are the implications when his historical evaluation is taken in its entirety. I believe it reveals future trends that will impact how we relate to information in the near and long term. Although I found the first few chapters to be a little slow, I’ve actually read it twice and may read it a third time…it’s that good.

Title: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

About: How the unpredictable is really unpredictable and how to deal with that. 

Why read it?

We should all be skeptical of models and people that “predict” what will happen, but we also need to plan for success and different possibilities. Taleb does a great job of explaining why the improbable usually has a lot more impact on our lives and businesses than what we planned for, and gives some advice on how to deal with that. (Also, the summary of fractals and self-similar replication at the end was really helpful for this geek wannabe.)

Title: World 3.0

Author: Pankaj Ghemawat (@PankajGhemawat)

About:  How distances and borders still heavily influence our lives, businesses and economics in general.

Why read it?

This should have been called “the world is NOT flat” as it’s really a counterpoint to the book The World is Flat and for that reason alone I think it’s a must read. So many people either blindly favor both globalization and deregulation—or oppose both of them. Ghemawat offers what I think is a more balanced option where these are not linked, binary choices. It’s worth picking this up just to understand an alternative way of looking at globalization.

Title: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Author: Tim Wu (@Superwuster)

About: Ebb and flow of decentralization and monolithic centralization of power in the information industry.

Why read it?

It’s a fascinating and entertaining review of the rise (and stumbling and rising) of major 20th century information powerhouses from the telegraph and telephone to Apple and the Internet. Regardless of whether you agree with Wu’s recommendations at the end, it’s worthwhile for those of us in IT to understand this history and evaluate how the cycle of decentralization and centralization might apply to our industry.

Title: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Author: Ray Kurzweil (@raykurzweil2035)

About: Enhanced human cognition and existence taken to a logical extreme.

Why read it?

Hmm. I almost didn’t include this one because Kurzweil gets pretty far out there on his ideas. However, it’s extremely interesting to consider technology as another phase in evolution and it might be valuable to ponder what that implies. I recommend it for those particularly interested in sci-fi and anyone that wants to get out of the box of their own thinking. This book was published around 2005, so you’ll notice some predictions that haven’t come true yet but if you can get past that it’s quite thought provoking.

So these are a few of my favorite reads that I managed to squeeze into 2011. What are your book recommendations?

With this newest release of HDI (see the press release), coupled with the power of the Hitachi Content Platform, we are arming customers with the necessary technology to free their information and take a step into the Content Cloud. As we outlined before, the key capabilities of the Content Cloud include information mobility and intelligence – putting the right data in the right place, at the right time, whilst empowering user control. This new version of HDI supports this vision in several ways.

First, HDI v3.0 includes technology that permits dynamic dispersion and sharing of data. Based on chosen policies, information written into one HDI (via standard NFS or CIFS) can automatically and transparently become available at multiple remote HDI instances. Imagine, for instance, wanting to distribute the new 20MB corporate presentation to each of many regional offices. Instead of emailing it (propagating hundreds if not thousands of copies – yuck) or putting it on SharePoint (slow downloads), you can instead drop it onto the “corporate drive”. This action will cause the other inter-connected HDIs to “see” that new content is available, and based on access it will be cached close to the users who want to get the new presentation (much faster, simple and seamless).

Next, HDI places control at the fingertips of users. Because by design and construction, a cloud built with HCP and HDI is backup free, placing tools in the hands of users to manage their own data is imperative. HCP already affords many controls for managing where data is stored, replicated, versioned, retained, and disposed. Now HDI passes this richness directly onto users via self directed recovery of prior stored versions or recovery of deleted content. Unlike other NAS technologies, HDI natively couples with the power of object-based management affording unparalleled granular access and control.

Finally, HDI includes some clever technology that helps customers adopt cloud in a very seamless fashion. By directly managing the transition of data non-disruptively from legacy NAS devices into the cloud-attached HDI, making the transition to cloud-based storage has never been easier. During the transition, all data remains available and once the transition completes, the richness of the Hitachi solution becomes fully available – bottom-less, backup-free file sharing that looks “legacy” NFS or CIFS to users and applications, but with the power of cloud underneath.

Take a look at the products in more detail for HDI and for HCP.

During a panel discussion, two of our customers commented how the use of cloud solutions was influencing their organizational structure—in short, that the higher level segmentations of server, storage and network groups were merging.  I know many folks had postulated that this would happen, but this is the first time I’ve heard customers from different industries talking about how it impacts business structure. Imagine what that might mean in the long term for business processes. This alone is an interesting topic, and I’d love to hear more real-life examples.

With the idea of unintended consequences of cloud still stuck in my head, I attended Super Computing 2011 last week, which Ken Wood summarized our participation in A Brief Visit to SC’11. This is a fascinating conference if you’re interested in the amazing things being done to turn data into meaningful information, and seeing the impressive projects from the likes of NASA, NOAA and educational institutions. For a non-promotional report on why this conference and supercomputing is important to our industry and society, check out this video summary from EE Times.

Amongst all the super charged brainpower, I heard one of the providers of High Performance Computing (HPC) mention that the concepts of cloud were changing what their end users wanted. I started asking the same question to others and it turns out that because this type of computing and analytics is extremely dependent on node to node fidelity and intolerant of failures, HPC providers had not anticipated a strong interest in cloud services.  However that’s exactly what they are starting to see.

The providers that I spoke to weren’t precisely sure how they would meet these growing requests for cloud-like hosting and delivery but they are working on it.  Super computing as a service (would that be SC-a-a-S?) would require some unique implementations of cloud solutions that would vary greatly from big data solutions due to dissimilar data and analytics models.  Is there enough of a market for SCaaS?  Hmm. Maybe or maybe we’ll call it something else?

These last two weeks have been ones of idea exploration for me, and I’m left with many more questions than I can answer.  However, if you’ve read my other posts, you know I love this process.  (Something good usually comes out of this exploration; I just can’t predict what it will be.)

So, please send me a quick note or write a comment about any unintended consequence of cloud that you’ve experienced or heard about.  I’ll collect them, post a summary, and maybe we’ll collectively come to a few “ah-ha!” moments.

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Having seen the cloud strategy develop from within HDS, and the significant debate over even minor implications, I can attest to how serious we are about using this vision as a lens to organize, prioritize and drive our business.  To help you understand how we are using this for our “bigger picture” I wanted to give you a little insight into some of our brainstorming as to what this vision might make possible today and in the future. And if you’re like me, there’s nothing better than an example to really illustrate the potential of an idea.

So let’s imagine what we could do with better insight using the concepts of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud.  Regardless of the industry, there are amazing accomplishments that can be made, but I’d like to use a healthcare example since we all can relate to having received care (or at least knowing someone that has received care).

In considering how the infrastructure cloud might be used in a healthcare example:  Let’s say that a doctor notices a suspicious illness pattern on rounds. In this case, the doctor could immediately spin up an internal SharePoint for hospital collaboration and an external message board requesting input.  No, this is not rocket science and yes, we can do this today. However without the dynamic resources of an infrastructure cloud, the doctor would have to submit his request and then wait a considerable amount of time for the approval, acquisition and implementation of resources to support the service he needs.  This would delay his ability to collaborate and reach out for assistance, and consequently lose valuable time in detecting a possible outbreak.

If we now look at the next stage of activities for this use case, we can see how a content cloud, built on top of the infrastructure cloud, would help the doctor obtain the data he needs quickly and securely.  For example, the doctor would likely want to search and share information among hospitals with appropriate rights and privacy protection in place while collecting content independent of the application it was created in. In this case, each patient report has a meta-tag for the mystery illness with pertinent information and privacy protection.   The doctor can quickly search across multiple IT systems and find the appropriate information he can then use for other study.  Without the fluid content that the content cloud enables, the doctor might be delayed in aggregating data, or even worse, completely miss information essential to understanding this developing situation.

In this example, we know that the doctor is ultimately trying to save lives and possibly contain an outbreak.  The information cloud can best enable this when layered on top of an infrastructure cloud and content cloud.  For instance, the doctor may identify a possible outbreak in a nearby city using a report that recombines medical analytic data with Google search trends. With this information, the doctor would notify city officials, who would then take preventative action to limit risk. At the same time, based on preset variables the information might also self-direct further search and analysis. For illustration, let’s say the results of this self-direction alerts the doctor of a potential historical match to these trends and this leads him to consider applying an old inoculation solution in a new way.  Applying this insight, he would be able to quickly head off the outbreak. Without the sophisticated insight the information cloud facilitates, the doctor might spend countless hours pouring over data and information: unable to sift out trends and patterns and unable to even consume other sources of information such as machine generated information…let alone be able to blend and analyze everything.  This could mean serious delay in not only identifying but also resolving the health risk.

(Is it me or does all this talk of “the doctor” and future capabilities have you thinking about the “Doctor Who” BBC series?  If you’re among us oddball science fiction fans, I’d love to hear who your favorite “Doctor” is.  One of my favorites is number 9, who you can see in this great promotional picture.)

It’s entertaining to consider vision concepts and build on the possibilities, but it also brings to light novel ideas, uses and even unforeseen challenges.

So what other possibilities and use cases can you dream up for our strategy for infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud?

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