Hitachi is also taking a position that its SAN and NAS storage solutions are also part of a cloud storage strategy as well.  Some of their existing customers are using it for private clouds for years (although we didn’t call it that) and there are even some service providers that are using the USP V as a semi-private cloud (see some stuff on Exacent - here and here).

Where everything begins and ends on Cloud Storage is implementation.  Over the next year it will be important to understand how all of these initiatives and solutions have been used in the cloud by real customers - and not just with HDS but all of the storage vendors.  So far, we have heard very little of about customers in this whole big buzz-fest from any vendor in regards to users of public clouds.

In my last blog - one reader said if I didn’t believe Cloud Storage was important than why blog about it.  I actually do believe that Cloud Storage is important but I think we need to cut through the hyperbole and rhetoric and understand the practical realities.  Amazon has over a billion objects stored on S2 - so yes - people are using storage in the public clouds.  But it has not been embraced by the mainstream - certainly not as a replacement for on-premise core storage.  And it is only just being considered as tertiary, DR and backup by the mainstream.  At least based on the 80 or so customers that I have spoken to in the last six months on this topic.  And I also think there is confusion between private and public clouds.  I agree that many customers are considering private cloud implementations but public clouds as a complement to their internal IT infrastructure is still not being embraced.

Hitachi Data Systems is taking a pragmatic and reasoned approach to Cloud Storage - adding features, applications and capabilities for cloud enablement.  They are extremely focused on being a storage company offering infrastructure and software for a number of use cases - with Cloud Storage being a potentially important one for the future.

My former employer - the Enterprise Strategy Group said this about Hitachi Cloud Storage that I think is a good encapsulation of the HDS Cloud Storage strategy (see the full ESG report by analyst Terri McClure):

“HDS has a well rounded vision for the future of cloud storage. Its vision is to build on its foundation of providing the industry‟s most integrated storage capabilities at the infrastructure layer, which provides the backbone to create cloud infrastructures for its customers’ unique requirements. Leveraging its expertise in block, file, and content storage, HDS is bringing the same type of data center integration, reliability, automation, security, storage efficiency, and performance to cost effectively scale cloud storage environments from terabytes to exabytes.”

I would like to see Hitachi talk more about services, partnerships and education around cloud storage.  I want to hear about best practices and enablement programs for customers to develop private clouds.  And they should have Cloud Storage programs working closely with services providers on developing these services for public and semi-public Clouds.

My observation is that the way that markets often work is that it isn’t enough to build technology that addresses a new use case.  When something like Cloud Storage comes along and there is a bunch of hype and buzz - often this creates a ton of confusion.  Therefore it is important not just to react but to create the answer and then educate others.

Tony Asaro: Can you please provide us with a background on your company?

Mark Teter: Advanced Systems Group has been in the business for twenty-nine years as an infrastructure provider. Our expertise is building application compute infrastructures that comprise servers, storage, storage fabrics and networks for the Global 500 data center to the Fortune 1000.  We specialize in SAN and NAS virtualization, tiered storage architectures; data de-duplication is very important today, content archiving, data protection and disaster recovery.

Tony Asaro: Please tell us what Hitachi Data Systems products and services you focus on?

Mark Teter: We focus on the entire Hitachi Data Systems product line from the modular to the enterprise class USP including their content archiving solution HCAP and their high performance NAS appliance, HNAS. And to that effort, we have a dedicated team of engineers and product specialists that are specifically trained and certified on this product portfolio. In fact, I would say they’re probably one of the most experienced and educated groups of engineers on Hitachi Data Systems technologies and product lines in the country.

Tony Asaro: Why did you decide to work with Hitachi Data Systems?

Mark Teter: One of the biggest reasons we decided to work closely with Hitachi Data Systems is because frankly they’re the only provider of a services oriented approach to data management - essentially an efficient approach in providing storage resource management solutions to our customers. Not only does Hitachi Data Systems have the industry’s fastest and most reliable storage platform, with their service oriented storage solution, it allows us to provide our customers with a simple to use, unified portfolio of storage management software solutions and management controls and Hitachi Data Systems is generations ahead of any competitor in the market today and it allows us to provide a highly differentiated value back to our customers.

Tony Asaro: Can you share with us customer examples that provide us with insights of the value that both your company and Hitachi brought to the situation?

Mark Teter: One of the many examples is with a large regional medical research hospital. By leveraging a virtualized SAN and NAS infrastructure with the Hitachi Data Systems platform, we were able to reduce the number of people needed to manage their storage infrastructure by over two people saving them roughly three hundred thousand dollars annually. By integrating their content archiving solution, we were able to then improve the capacity use deferring a planned purchase of over twenty terabytes of new capacity. Now with this extreme consolidation we were able to achieve, we removed three other storage solutions along with the associated reduction in hardware, software, maintenance cost, floor space, electricity and air conditioning expenses; a nearly five hundred thousand dollar reduction in ongoing OPEX expenses. With our design, we were able to extend the life of older storage assets reducing even further CAPEX expenses. ASG brought tremendous value to this hospital by providing a reliable, scalable storage infrastructure that has provided them with an extremely cost effective platform not only for the hospital but for the ongoing research that the hospital performs. Previously they had a multi vendor management tool set, isolated pools of storage fragmented across their infrastructure making it very difficult to share resources, improve operational efficiency and lower costs.

Another example is a large company that provides satellite imagery to the US government, Google and other commercial entities. ASG designed and deployed multiple petabytes of storage comprising both modular and enterprise cache centric arrays and a tiered storage architecture. In fact, this storage infrastructure won Computer World’s best practices award in 2008. The customer is now able to leverage a completely virtualized SAN and NAS environment allowing them to very cost effectively capture and deliver their satellite imagery worldwide. And by implementing this tiered storage architecture the customer was finally able to dramatically improve storage capacities and lower capital and operational expenses while at the same time easing the access demand to any single storage tier.

Tony Asaro: Please provide us with a summary of your experience working with Hitachi Data Systems.

Mark Teter: ASG has worked with Hitachi Data Systems for over ten years. Over the course of this time, we have sold Hitachi Data Systems solutions to hundreds of large and small customers. In any business relationship that spans this amount of time, you inevitably run into client issues whether it’s pricing, product returns or just unsatisfied customers. However working with Hitachi Data Systems has always been the fairest, most equitable experience for us and our clients compared to other vendors that we work with. During the course of this time, we have been able to grow our business ten percent year over year building a substantial satisfied customer base that continues to grow and allows us to expand our Hitachi Data Systems sales and services. Overall, our experience with Hitachi Data Systems has been one of the most rewarding vendor relationships we have had and will continue to have.

There is a ton of confusion about what IT Clouds are and yet people are predicting that it will completely change the way that we implement and manage technology going forward.  On one level this is an absurd prediction because there is no specificity.  However, twenty years ago someone could have said that applications will change the way we do business and they would be right.  However, the devil is in the details - which applications and how we use them could not be predicted as easily.

I suspect that the same is true for IT Clouds.  The idea of using a service providers CPU and storage is one definition of cloud.  Amazon EC2 and S3 are doing quite well as far as we know.  Online services like DropBox and Twitter use Amazon.  It is a powerful indicator when a new service enables new businesses.  The fact that none of them are making a profit should not concern you

I’ve spoken with literally dozens of IT professionals (note - based on one reader’s lack of math skills I wanted to add that it has been over 80 companies since June of this year through September) and companies this year and none of them are seriously considering using IT Clouds.  There was one company that was going to build their own private IT Cloud and another that was doing some initial investigation.  There is still a ton of education that needs to be provided.  There is clarity of segmentation that has to occur.  Considering cloud solutions requires a shift in mindset, which does not come easily.  And a deep considerations of the risks must be conducted.  We are far from public clouds replacing brick and mortar IT infrastructure.

One IT professional at a Fortune 500 company said to me that they consider virtualization - both at the server and storage level to be cloud enabling technologies and they intend to build IT Clouds within their own environment leveraging virtualization. According to him - the difference between just using those technologies as they stand today are the disciplines and processes on top of those technologies.

IT Clouds will manifest it different ways.  There will be many failures and there will be unforeseen successes.  There are many steps that need to be taken and we are at the beginning of that journey.

Here are some titles I thought about using:

1. A Cloudy View

2. Head in the Clouds

3. Cloud on the Horizon

4. Cloud Gazing

5. Clouds Are Nebulous

6. Cloudy Forecast For Clouds

7. Cloudy Minds

8. Clouded In Uncertainty

9. Foggy On Clouds

Next Blog: Analysis of HItachi Agile Cloud

Scalability can include scaling for performance and capacity in combination or separately. Reliability can be improved since in a cache coherent cluster these systems become one logical brain.  In a three-way cluster up to two nodes can fail and read/writes are still available even if performance is degraded.  In a four-way up to three nodes can fail, a six-way up to five nodes can fail, etc.  At least conceptually this is true.  You can add resources as you need to as building blocks.

When you have an Enterprise-class storage system like the USP V, it has plenty of scalability and reliability.  You can add resources within the USP V including additional cache memory, channel adapters, etc.  The USP is more akin to a blade chassis.

Naturally, as with anything there are nuances and details that may differ based on the product, how its used, the requirements and the environment.  One could argue there is a cost advantage to just-in-time scalability because you don’t need a ton of overhead.  However, you must be careful since sometimes it is an all-or-nothing proposition - you get processors, memory and capacity even if you only need one or two of these components.   Additionally, having a shared brain amongst these different nodes does come at a price - efficient communication is required that can impact performance.  That is why often cache coherent storage clusters often focus on certain types of workloads.

With Enterprise-class environments often risk is more expensive than capital. Therefore the top priorities above CAPEX savings often include a proven track record, interoperability, supportability, quality assurance, performance, OS support, application support, and the necessary features and capabilities to meet the needs of the service levels of the business.

I am a proponent of n-way storage clustering but we must consider the practical implications especially within Enterprise-class environments.

1.. The NAS market is an interesting one.  Effectively most customers have only one vendor to go to for what I call mainstream NAS and that is NetApp.  EMC Celerra is not really selling into non-EMC customers.  The other NAS players are all really small or focused on vertical markets.  HDS has had NAS solutions for some time but these new midrange NAS products broaden their market to mainstream NAS.  It is very important to have another Tier One storage vendor offering a competitive and compelling NAS product in the market place.

2.  There are a ton of FC SAN customers that have no NAS systems.  Instead they are using a ton of Microsoft, Linux and Unix file servers that are SAN-attached.  At some point the sheer size of this type of configuration is costly and inefficient.  I was just on the phone with a very large insurance company that has hundreds of TBs of file content but no NAS but rather hundreds of SAN-attached file servers.  In these economic times reducing the cost, footprint and management of these systems seems like a no-brainer.  The fact that HDS is a FC SAN company and has the expertise and relationships with their customers is important helping to bridge the gap and help them to make the leap into NAS (yes I know I just mixed metaphors).

3. The cost point has to make sense.  The HDS HNAS solution is an excellent one but for many mainstream NAS customers it is too expensive.  The Hitachi 3080 and 3090 have a much broader market because it fits within budget requirements of the mainstream while providing the necessary capabilities.

4. The Hitachi NAS 3080 and 3090 use the same software as the higher end HNAS - which is an excellent solution that provides high levels of reliability, scalability, performance, mixed workload support, a wide range of valuable software features, easy to manage, it is a new solution but is already field proven and it is integrated with other HDS solutions.  For example these new Hitachi NAS solutions works with Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS) - which enables search, indexing and online, transparent data movement (see my blog - Hitachi Search and Move).

5. In order to scale and support the mainstream NAS market having a formidable channel can greatly accelerate adoption and overall success from the customer perspective.   HDS has spent the last few years building their channel and it is actually responsible for a huge amount of their overall revenue (I think it is close to 50%).  I’ve spoken to a number of HDS channel partners and they are extremely excited about the new Hitachi NAS systems.

6.  We all know that file content is growing in leaps and bounds.  More content is being created and these files are getting bigger and bigger.  NAS becomes more important as the shift continues towards file content consuming most of the capacity in the data center.

7. As with so much in IT - VMware plays a big role in the ongoing role of NAS - extending it beyond just file content, but rather supporting any application running on VMware including databases and email.  Using NFS is arguably a better protocol versus iSCSI or FC in many environments in terms of ease of management and even performance.  VMware is changing the way we use NAS and NFS.

The role of NAS is still evolving even this late in its life-cycle.  It is important that there are other major players to give the customer choices that are valuable and viable.  And perhaps HDS can break down the barriers that still exist with large Enterprise customers that are FC centric and to start seeing NAS as a complement and not a replacement of their FC SAN environments.

Tony Asaro:  Please tell us what Hitachi Data Systems products and services you focus on?

Andreas Deakin:  Dataflex offers all HDS products; hardware and software and certainly services.  We focus on the AMS series, the USP’s.  We also do the HNAS. Software-wise, we’re doing the IT Operations Analyzer, the Data Protection Suite and TrueCopy.  Those are probably our core products from the HDS range.  All Hitachi systems we work with have the following in common - they provide the flexibility, reliability, durability and capacity, we and our clients require.  They also have an excellent cost/performance ratio.

Tony Asaro:  Why did you decide to work with Hitachi Data Systems?

Andreas Deakin:  We believe HDS expertise coupled with local market knowledge will be a potent competitor.  HDS was also keen for partners to grow their services business and develop real value to both client and partner.  The others were not so keen to give away profit.  The rest is history with Dataflex winning two to one over our competition.

Tony Asaro: Do consider Hitachi Data Systems a strategic partner and why?

Andreas Deakin:  HDS is certainly a strategic partner for Dataflex.  Because of our strong storage focus, Dataflex needs a strategic storage partner to provide our customers enterprise storage solutions.  HDS fits perfect in our portfolio.  Most of our clients in the federal government space and these clients are looking even more for enterprise storage systems rather than just a low price.  Through our close partnership and alliance with HDS, we are able to provide these tailor made storage solutions.

Tony Asaro:  Your company deals with customer issues and challenges directly - tell us what you have found are the biggest issues in regards with storage today and how you address them?

Andreas Deakin:  In our extensive experience, the biggest issue in storage today is in areas of virtualization, tiering and disaster recovery.  We are very successful by addressing virtualization issues, for example, with a diskless USP VM from medium size solutions or for large implementations with a fully populated USP VM.  We recently proposed with an HDS HNAS and USP VM to address tiering and virtualization requirements.  For this particular customer, it was important to have a virtualization and tiering layer, which supports different storage vendors underneath.  More and more customers approach us with a remote replication requirement.  Because of HDS’ wide variety of software products, we’re able to use Hitachi’s replication and data protection software to address disaster recovery challenges.

Tony Asaro:  Can you share with us customer examples that provide us with insights of the value that both your company and Hitachi brought to the situation?

Andreas Deakin:  A really good example for a NAS implementation is certainly the HNAS installation at a University in Canberra.  HNAS was ideal for this customer.  The University wanted to address different storage windows and the HNAS header was able to provide this ability.   We also won and we’re really  proud of that, the HDS Business Solution of the year award for this project.

Tony Asaro:  Please provide us with a summary of your experience working with Hitachi Data Systems.

Andreas Deakin:  From a channel partner perspective, working with HDS is adding real value to our business.  Hitachi is definitely committed to the channel and it’s a win-win situation for Dataflex and HDS I would say.  We complete each other.  The high quality products from HDS and the service from Dataflex are just a great combination for our customers.  When it comes to real quality and enterprise storage solutions, we’re talking about HDS.

Heidi is focusing on HDS solutions driving ecosystem software, hardware and services around HDS storage systems.  This is not a new concept within HDS but it certainly can be brought to another level.  One important step is to get the word out about these solutions to a broader audience.  I believe that is the goal of the Biggar Picture - I encourage you to add it to your reading list.

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Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS) provides two powerful capabilities.  First, it is an application that has a search engine that works with HNAS, HCAP, BlueArc and NetApp NAS storage.   You can run queries on all of these heterogeneous NAS systems as a part of an eDiscovery process, research and development, locating and retrieving valuable content, etc.  

HDDS not only provides keyword search capability at the metadata level but it can actually perform searches of keywords within content .  If you are a BlueArc or NetApp customer you can use HDDS as a standalone solution - you don’t need to have Hitachi HNAS or HCAP to take advantage of this powerful application with federated search.  Obviously, if you have HNAS and HCAP then HDDS is a valuable solution that performs comprehensive, intelligent and fast searches.  

The other important capability that HDDS provides are policies that enable  transparent and online data movement to move data from the primary HNAS storage system to the active archive HCAP storage system.  This enables intelligent tiering at the file level for all unstructured data stored on these systems.

Here are some important things to consider:

- File and content data is growing at alarming rates and consuming the lion’s share of our Enterprise storage.  

- It is typical that 70-80% of all data is dormant and unused 90 days after it’s creation.  

- Everyone is trying to reduce CAPEX in the data center

- There are thousands of proof points that intelligent tiering can save customers a ton of money

- Moving unused file and content data from primary Enterprise higher cost NAS to archival storage that is lower cost is a no-brainer and low hanging fruit

I was just taking to a very large insurance firm and we discussed search and intelligent tiering.  We didn’t talk about specific products - this was a strategy session to discuss technologies and market trends.  They are a big FC SAN shop with no NAS in place today but they do have 100s of TBs of file content.  This is not an uncommon scenario.  Like many of their peers they have hundreds of file servers that are SAN-attached.  

In the past, the popular option was to put in Enterprise NAS solutions to consolidate these file servers.  This reduces cost, maintenance complexity, provides better data management services, etc.  Therefore just implementing NAS would be valuable.  However, if they stepped back and implemented a strategy that included two tiers - high-end NAS as Tier One and archival storage as Tier Two with policy-based data movement between these tiers - they would gain even further incremental value.  Additionally, search would give them the ability to make better use out of the 100s of TBs of file content they have within their Enterprise.  This is a strategic, pragmatic and valuable project that would result in significantly reducing capital and operational expenditure.

One of the big issues is that storage administrators haven’t figured out why they need search or concluded that it should be a priority project. There are some applications and use cases that are a priority - such as eDiscovery and that is the one area that does drive search apps with storage.  But ultimately storage admins have not found the killer app that gives them that “aha” moment where they just need to have it and are willing to invest time and money.

The killer app is using search as a tool to give Enterprise end users greater access to the company’s data - but this is too generic for IT professionals and companies to justify.  However, we create so much content, using any number of applications, and instead of looking for data via the various application interfaces, having a single pane of glass, to get to any and all content in the Enterprise, would provide huge increases in productivity and efficiency.

This concept should not be a leap for most people , but since no one is complaining about it or demanding it, it isn’t a priorty. However, if you think about the power of being able to easily access content - data - information - we all know that mountains can be moved when this ability is provided. 

Question - how many of you know that HDS actually has a search application called Hitachi Data Discovery Suite?  This is a home grown search application that works with HNAS, HCAP, NetApp FAS and BlueArc solutions.  More info on this in my next HDS blog.