Tech Talk

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With the release of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Pro for VMware vSphere, we introduced a number of firsts for converged infrastructure solutions

• The industry’s first converged platform offering 100% parity across RESTful API, CLI and GUI
• A truly unified, “single pane of glass” end-to-end infrastructure orchestration solution with a low
  learning curve, due to our unique  UCP Director software, which integrates directly into VMware
  vCenter
• The only converged infrastructure that can leverage a customer’s existing storage, either by connecting to a customer’s existing Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP); or, by virtualizing a customer’s third party storage arrays using Hitachi VSP (more than 100 third party storage arrays from different vendors have already been certified – see supported storage here)

Hitachi UCP Pro for VMware vSphere was designed and developed from the ground up as a highly integrated solution with industry-leading elements. Unlike competing converged solutions, UCP Pro for VMware vSphere offers customers:

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Having grown up in the 80s I recall fondly Wendy’s famous commercials with the charismatic woman pondering “where’s the beef”. In the included video she ends with, “I don’t think there’s anybody there.  I really don’t.”  The trip down memory lane got me thinking about some things that are going on in the industry this week. Some are hidden, but meaty. Others well, there’s a lot of bun in the message and it makes me want to proclaim from a rooftop, “WHERE’S THE BEEF? HANG ON, IS ANYBODY THERE?”

In the spirit of exposing hidden but meaty things, I do want to reference two visionary gems.

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My colleague Nick Winkworth published a great blog on the new Gartner Group “Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers” and how it positions HDS and our blade server offerings. It’s a worthy read.

Given that I commented on the Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Arrays with a blog, I thought it best to give the server business some equal attention. When the storage-focused and blade-focused Magic Quadrants are reviewed, you’ll see that there is a lot of commonality in how positively Hitachi is positioned. It’s great to see our strategy becoming understood by the analyst community.

There is one main difference between the Magic Quadrants, and it’s one that multi-tasking readers rush to – the picture. Of course in this case the picture is the “Quadrant” that highlights the placement of each vendor. In the blade server space, HDS is shown as being in the Niche category, while in the general purpose disk arrays we are positioned as a Leader.

So the question is, in today’s world does the old adage still hold true? Does a picture still equate to a thousand words?

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This week Gartner announced its latest “Magic Quadrant” report for blade servers.  Once again Hitachi Blade servers are included in the report, and once again Hitachi’s position on the chart has moved upwards and to the right; improving in both “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute”.

The report consists of the chart itself, and also some commentary  indicating pros and cons (or “strengths” and “cautions” as Gartner calls them)  for each vendor. The commentary for Hitachi, which was excellent in past  years,  is even better this year, calling out our strong innovation in blade technologies and noting our products’ high rating and popularity among  our customers . The report even clearly explains our strategy for addressing the market through our Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) solutions in combination with our storage technologies. In fact the only “cautions” boil down to the simple fact that  – relative to the big server vendors -  Hitachi remains little known in the broader blade market with a small market share outside Japan.

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As the final production truck has packed up and pulled away from the Las Vegas Convention Center declaring the end of the 2013 NAB conference, we look back at the new products and technologies announced at the show. One thing that became very apparent was that if you can’t relate to the following 5 topics, you probably weren’t at the right conference:

• Cloud services
• Storage inside the workflow or machine
• 4K
• Better camera capture
• Brilliant imagery on and in everything

Yes, that means you’d better get integrated with open APIs and into accelerating workflow applications. I would like to briefly focus on two areas:

Storage inside the workflow or machine: Expect to see end-to-end media workflows with emphasis on higher quality and reduced costs, while producing brilliant colors without shutter jitter. Below is the end-to-end workflow diagram that we showed visitors in our booth.

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Almost three years ago, Hitachi Data Systems was one of the first companies to announce solutions to support Microsoft’s Private Cloud Fast Track program. Our customers had been looking for cost-effective private cloud infrastructures that were both easy to deploy and easy to maintain, and that’s what we delivered.  Since then, we’ve seen strong adoption of our Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track solutions in major vertical markets, such as telecommunications, web hosting providers, service providers and Fortune 1000 customers in retail and finance. A great example of this is a regional telecom customer who rolled out our Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Select for Microsoft Private Cloud solution in stages, supporting ITaaS for internal use initially, followed by affiliates, then finally by enterprise customers. This telecom customer expects to leverage  our infrastructure for the next five to 10  years – making that quite the return on investment. What’s more, our converged infrastructure is practically bullet-proof, with 99.999% reliability – stronger than any public cloud offering in their region.

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To those in the storage world who rejoice in being in-the-know about the ever shifting technology and vendor landscape in front of them, Gartner Magic Quadrants are seen as major events in the “Vendor Olympics” that our industry can often devolve into. Now, by combining multiple disparate storage-related Magic Quadrants into one review of General-Purpose Disk Arrays (made publically available by HDS for you, here) it seems Gartner has created the decathlon of the storage Vendor Olympics.

Midrange, High-End, NAS, Monolithic? Yup, the gang’s all here.

And while you might be a fan or a detractor of Gartner’s methodologies,  it does measure two vectors of actual importance to storage customers: a vendor’s ability to execute and its completeness of vision.  (Or, in my own plain English – “Can they do what they say?” and “Can they correctly anticipate customer and market needs?”) While my perspective comes squarely on the vendor side, those do seem like pretty appropriate areas to focus on.

Given the new, broader focus of this Magic Quadrant and significant industry chatter that can follow any new Gartner commentary, it seemed relevant to add some thoughts and perspective about it.

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Well, we’re a day away from “The Rumble”. Forget about the Presidential debates, the Vice Presidential debate, and the Jon Stewart/Bill O’Reilly debate.  “The Rumble” (Tuesday, October 16 at 1:55PM at SNW in San Jose) is for keeps. This time it’s for real. If you’re an SNW attendee, you might consider this event for some afternoon entertainment.

Moderating this group of ragtag fighters is Mark Peters (Enterprise Strategy Group). The fighters are George Teixeira (CEO, DataCore), Mark Davis (CEO, Vistro), Ron Riffe (Business Line Manager, IBM), and of course yours truly (Chief Scientist, HDS). The subject will be storage hypervisors and storage virtualization. Come join the fun. The winner of this debate should be the attendees. It’s a “winner take all” and there will be no rematch.

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Well, I think it is. In school, I majored in Analogies (with a double minor in Metaphors and Euphemisms) so I think the comparison is very appropriate, and something I’ve spoken much about (those of you having to sit through my diatribes of late will get the connection).

For those of you that don’t know, the Google Car is a “driverless” car. Actually, it does require a driver but the driver is not required to do anything. In California now (as in Nevada and Hawaii), these cars have been promoted from “experimental” status to legal as of this bill signing by our governor Jerry Brown, this week.

I’ve run into them (not literally!) a few times on Bay Area freeways and I find them fascinating. As you can see in the picture, there is a cylinder on the roof that rotates at 10 RPM to sense road conditions and adjusts driving appropriately. It apparently also reads the posted speed limit road signs—something I am still learning to do.

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As per my last post we’ve scaled-down Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) into a smaller form factor. I’d like to dig in a little deeper and explain why Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM) is dramatically different than our past efforts with scaled down enterprise platforms such as Universal Storage Platform VM (USP VM). My esteemed colleague Hu Yoshida discusses some of the key design points of HUS VM and its relationship to both VSP and HUS. In the past, and as Hu articulates in his post, we’ve followed a practice of miniaturization to take an enterprise storage system and make a physically smaller version of it. Essentially with USP VM and Network Storage Controller (NSC) before that, we kept the architecture the same, but we put less of the ingredients inside. So the miniaturized version was the same system with less cache, fewer processors, fewer ports, less on the backend, etc. in less space and a 19-inch rack.  When we look at HUS VM we’ve rewritten the rules because rather than miniaturize the system we’ve scaled it down. Instead of using less of the same we’ve replaced key components with functional equivalents that are Hitachi value added or COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) in nature. The net is that the core hardware architecture of HUS VM is quite different than VSP, yet it still runs the same value-added block microcode as its bigger brother.