Hitachi Data Systems to focus on long-term sustainability

       When it comes to enterprise-class data storage, doing more with less through virtualisation, data de-duplication and tiered storage now sounds more attractive than ever. The leader in storage virtualisation, Hitachi Data Systems is now taking that message beyond the data centre and has created models in a language that the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) can actually understand.
       Speaking at a press release at the HDS user conference in Bangkok, HDS Chief Technical Officer Hubert Yoshida said that rather than simply cutting costs of equipment to make it possible for customers to continue buying during the slump, the focus is now on long term sustainability and providing the customer with the tools to measure and reduce the total cost of ownership.
       He explained the now well known virtues of virtualisation (separating the application from physical hardware so it can move around), de-duplication (getting rid of copies and replacing them with a pointer to one set of data), dynamic provisioning (allocating only what is used and sharing the unused but promised storage space in a pool), and archiving (storing old, non-changing data that is rarely accessed on tier-three slow storage)before talking about how much of the focus this year is on getting that message across to the CFO.
       One of HDS's researchers, David Merrill has a framework, a series of spreadsheets and documentation, that teaches the accountants how to understand the cost elements in storage and monitor them, known as Storage Economics.Today many costs such as power and cooling still go unmeasured and if they are not monitored, how then can the cost structure be optimised.
       Merrill's framework consists of 33 different types of cost, how to set a target and how technology can help to reach that target. Once the target is attained,the model goes further to address sustainability.
       "In this type of economy, we cannot wait three years, we need payback within the budget year and there are some quick payback things we can look for," Yoshida said.
       At the top of the list is virtualisation.Implementing virtualisation has a direct impact on the cost of migrating applications. Instead of taking six to nine months to migrate a legacy application that is hard coded to its storage, this means it can be done over a weekend or two.
       Away from the usual case studies of savings through virtualisation, Yoshida gave the audience a glimpse of how new technology was actually changing the game and bringing along huge savings.PayFormance, a US healthcare billing company, has used the HDS active ar-chive technology to run its billing application straight off the archive without using a database.
       Archived information cannot be changed by definition. Healthcare information must not be changed by law,thus the complexity, cost and flexibility of a proper database was not needed.The system design, admittedly quite unique, saved PayFormance the cost of database licenses and trained database administrators.
       One of the bigger savings in the model is the cost of risk. Here, Yoshida explained that virtualisation brings with redundancy and in a 128-way processor system,nothing would be affected if three or four processors were to fail. Conversely,traditional modular storage is akin to a pair of legs. If one is shot, nothing can be done until it has been fixed. The figures for downtime are also formalised and not a matter of guesswork, with risk managers in the financial services and trading industries carefully calculating how many millions of dollars each hour of downtime would cost the company.
       Virtualisation also helps disaster recovery and business continuity as everything can be transferred to the DR site in one pipe rather than a dozen apps using a dozen different conduits with deference technologies.
       HDS Senior Vice-President and General Manager for Asia-Pacific Kevin Egglestrom said that after the last 18 months of significant downturn, the economy is now showing signs of recovery as reflected in the equity indices and that he expects the Asia-Pacific region to lead the world recovery. That said, he noted that HDS has always done well in both good and bad times. For 2008, IDC figures said that the market in Thailand declined by six percent, but that HDS' market share was, more than six and less than,say,20 percent. One of his colleagues later confirmed that HDS had actually grown eight percent in the declining market last year, a double-digit delta.
       In 2008, HDS also became the leader in the high end global storage market,ahead of EMC and IBM.
       HDS country manager Thaweesak Saengthong spoke of how he was seeing an explosion in data needs from the government sector especially in security monitoring and mobile. For the first time in a generation, the economic situation is forcing banks to compete for customers and now they are launching campaigns to woo customers. The challenge here is flexibility and how to get the campaign to market soonest.
       He also noted that HDS has won a contract with the Bank of Thailand and how HDS active archive solutions could have prevented the recent scandals regarding the tampering with the political party member register and making the servers stolen from government house worthless.