Object storage – Page 5 – Silverton Consulting

Who’s the next winner in data storage?

Posted on August 15, 2013August 15, 2013 by Ray in CIFS/SMB, Cloud services, Cloud storage, data access, Data availability, data services, Distributed computing, FC, FCoE, NFS, Object storage, Storage, Storage availability, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Visionary organizations

Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

“The future is already here – just not evenly distributed”, W. Gibson

It starts as it always does outside the enterprise data center. In the line of businesses, in the development teams, in the small business organizations that don’t know any better but still have an unquenchable need for data storage.

It’s essentially an Innovator’s Dillemma situation. The upstarts are coming into the market at the lower end, lower margin side of the business that the major vendors don’t seem to care about, don’t service very well and are ignoring to their peril.

Yes, it doesn’t offer all the data services that the big guns (EMC, Dell, HDS, IBM, and NetApp) have. It doesn’t offer the data availability and reliability that enterprise data centers have come to demand from their storage. require. And it doesn’t have the performance of major enterprise data storage systems.

But what it does offer, is lower CapEx, unlimited scaleability, and much easier to manage and adopt data storage, albeit using a new protocol. It does have some inherent, hard to get around problems not the least of which is speed of data ingest/egress, highly variable latency and eventual consistency. There are other problems which are more easily solvable, with work, but the three listed above are intrinsic to the solution and need to be dealt with systematically.

And the winner is …

It has to be cloud storage providers and the big elephant in the room has to be Amazon. I know there’s a lot of hype surrounding AWS S3 and EC2 but you must admit that they are growing, doubling year over year. Yes it is starting from a much lower capacity point and yes, they are essentially providing “rentable” data storage space with limited or even non-existant storage services. But they are opening up whole new ways to consume storage that never existed before. And therein lies their advantage and threat to the major storage players today, unless they act to counter this upstart.

On AWS’s EC2 website there must be 4 dozen different applications that can be fired up in the matter of a click or two. When I checked out S3 you only need to signup and identify a bucket name to start depositing data (files, objects). After that, you are charged for the storage used, data transfer out (data in is free), and the number of HTTP GETs, PUTs, and other requests that are done on a per month basis. The first 5GB is free and comes with a judicious amount of gets, puts, and out data transfer bandwidth.

… but how can they attack the enterprise?

Aside from the three systemic weaknesses identified above, for enterprise customers they seem to lack enterprise security, advanced data services and high availability storage. Yes, NetApp’s Amazon Direct addresses some of the issues by placing enterprise owned, secured and highly available storage to be accessed by EC2 applications. But to really take over and make a dent in enterprise storage sales, Amazon needs something with enterprise class data services, availability and security with an on premises storage gateway that uses and consumes cloud storage, i.e., a cloud storage gateway. That way they can meet or exceed enterprise latency and services requirements at something that approximates S3 storage costs.

We have talked about cloud storage gateways before but none offer this level of storage service. An enterprise class S3 gateway would need to support all storage protocols, especially block (FC, FCoE, & iSCSI) and file (NFS & CIFS/SMB). It would need enterprise data services, such as read-writeable snapshots, thin provisioning, data deduplication/compression, and data mirroring/replication (synch and asynch). It would need to support standard management configuration capabilities, like VMware vCenter, Microsoft System Center, and SMI-S. It would need to mask the inherent variable latency of cloud storage through memory, SSD and hard disk data caching/tiering.. It would need to conceal the eventual consistency nature of cloud storage (see link above). And it would need to provide iron-clad, data security for cloud storage.

It would also need to be enterprise hardened, highly available and highly reliable. That means dually redundant, highly serviceable hardware FRUs, concurrent code load, multiple controllers with multiple, independent, high speed links to the internet. Todays, highly-available data storage requires multi-path storage networks, multiple-independent power sources and resilient cooling so adding multiple-independent, high-speed internet links to use Amazon S3 in the enterprise is not out of the question. In addition to the highly available and serviceable storage gateway capabilities described above it would need to supply high data integrity and reliability.

Who could build such a gateway?

I would say any of the major and some of the minor data storage players could easily do an S3 gateway if they desired. There are a couple of gateway startups (see link above) that have made a stab at it but none have it quite down pat or to the extent needed by the enterprise.

However, the problem with standalone gateways from other, non-Amazon vendors is that they could easily support other cloud storage platforms and most do. This is great for gateway suppliers but bad for Amazon’s market share.

So, I believe Amazon has to invest in it’s own storage gateway if they want to go after the enterprise. Of course, when they create an enterprise cloud storage gateway they will piss off all the other gateway providers and will signal their intention to target the enterprise storage market.

So who is the next winner in data storage – I have to believe its going to be and already is Amazon. Even if they don’t go after the enterprise which I feel is the major prize, they have already carved out an unbreachable market share in a new way to implement and use storage. But when (not if) they go after the enterprise, they will threaten every major storage player.

Yes but what about others?

Arguably, Microsoft Azure is in a better position than Amazon to go after the enterprise. Since their acquisition of StorSimple last year, they already have a gateway that with help, could be just what they need to provide enterprise class storage services using Azure. And they already have access to the enterprise, already have the services, distribution and goto market capabilities that addresses enterprise needs and requirements. Maybe they have it all but they are not yet at the scale of Amazon. Could they go after this – certainly, but will they?

Google is the other major unknown. They certainly have the capability to go after enterprise cloud storage if they want. They already have Google Cloud Storage, which is priced under Amazon’s S3 and provides similar services as far as I can tell. But they have even farther to go to get to the scale of Amazon. And they have less of the marketing, selling and service capabilities that are required to be an enterprise player. So I think they are the least likely of the big three cloud providers to be successful here.

There are many other players in cloud services that could make a play for enterprise cloud storage and emerge out of the pack, namely Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and others. I suppose DropBox, Box and the other file sharing/collaboration providers might also be able to take a shot at it, if they wanted. But I am not sure any of them have enterprise storage on their radar just yet.

And I wouldn’t leave out the current major storage, networking and server players as they all could potentially go after enterprise cloud storage if they wanted to. And some are partly there already.

Comments?

Is object storage outpacing structured and unstructured data growth?

Posted on August 13, 2013August 13, 2013 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud storage, Data, Data growth, File Storage, Object storage, Storage

NASA Blue Marble 2007 West by NASA Goddard Photo (cc) (from flickr)

At the Pacific Crest conference this week there was some lively discussion about the differences in the rates of data growth. Some believe that object storage is growing much faster than structured and unstructured data. For proof they point to the growth in Amazon S3 data objects and Microsoft Azure data objects.

Azure data objects quadrupled between June 2011 and June 2012 from 0.93T to over 4.0T objects. Recently at the Microsoft Build Conference they indicated they are now storing over 8T objects which is doubling every six months. (See here and here).
Amazon S3 has also been growing, in June of 2012 they had over 1T objects and in April of 2013 they were storing over 2T objects. (See here).

For comparison purposes an Amazon S3 object is not equivalent in size to an Azure data object. I believe Amazon S3 objects are significantly larger (10 to 1000X larger) than an Azure data object (but I have no proof for this statement).

Nonetheless, Azure and S3 object storage growth rates are going off the charts.

Comparing object storage growth to structured-unstructured data growth

How does the growth in objects compare to the growth in structured and unstructured storage. Most analysts claim that data is growing by 40-50% per year. And most of that is unstructured. However I would contend that when you dig deeper into unstructured aggregate, you find vastly different growth trajectories.

Historically, unstructured used to mean file data as well as object data, and it’s only recently that anyone considered tracking them differently. But if you start splitting out object data from the aggregate how fast is file data growing.

The key is file data growth

Latest IDC numbers tell us that NAS market revenue is declining while open-SAN (NAS and non-mainframe SAN) revenues were up slightly for 2Q2013 (See here for more information). Realize that revenue numbers aren’t necessarily equal to data growth and NAS doesn’t contain unified storage (NAS and SAN) combined (which is how most enterprise vendors sell file storage these days). The other consideration is that flash’s performance is potentially reducing storage overprovisioning and data reduction technologies (dedupe, compression, thin provisioning, etc.) are increasing capacity utilization which is driving down storage growth.

The other thing is that the amount of data in structured and unstructured forms is probably orders of magnitude larger than object data.

So objects storage is starting at much lower capacities. But Amazon S3 and Azure data objects are also only a part of the object storage space. Most pure object storage solutions only reach their stride at 1PB and or larger and may grow significantly from there.

Given all the foregoing what’s my take on the various growth rates of structured, unstructured and object storage, when in aggregate data is growing by 40-50% per year?

Assuming a baseline of 50% data growth rate, my best guess (and that’s all it is) is that,

Structured data growth accounts for 15% of overall data growth
Unstructured data growth accounts for 25% of overall data growth
Object storage accounts for 10% of overall data growth

You could easily convince me that object storage is more like 5% today and divide the remainder across structured and unstructured.

So how much data is this?

IDC claimed that the world created and replicated 2.8ZB of data in 2012 and predict 4ZB of data will be created/replicated in 2013 (~43% growth rate). So of the 1.2ZB of data created in 2013, ~0.36ZB of that will be structured, 0.6ZB will be unstructured-file data and 0.24ZB will be unstructured-object storage data.

At first blush, the object storage component looks much too large until you start thinking about all the media, satellite and mobile data being created these days. And then it seems about right to me.

What do you think?

EMCworld 2013 day 1

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, DAS, Disk storage, Distributed computing, File Storage, Information economy, Market dynamics, Mobile computing, Object storage, Server virtualization, Software Defined Network, SSD storage, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage virtualization, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Lines for coffee at the Cafe were pretty long this morning and I missed my opportunity to have breakfast to do some work. But eventually made my way to the press room and got some food and coffee.

Spent the morning in Analyst sessions mostly under NDA but it seems safe to say that EMC sees plenty of opportunity ahead.

The first session Q&A with BRS executives and customers was enlightening but the main message from the customers was that data protection is hard, legacy systems often can’t adjust quick enough and sometimes a completely new architecture is warranted. The executives were upbeat about current BRS business and where they were headed in the future.

Rest of the morning was with Jeremy Burton EVP Product, Operations and Marketing and John Roese, the new SVP and CTO of EMC (6 months on the job). Jeremy talked about an IDC insight that there’s a new world emerging so-called 3rd platform applications based on mobile and consumer grade technology with literally billions of users, millions of apps built on mobile-cloud-bigdata-social infrastructure which complements the 2nd platform built on lan/wan, client server frameworks.

For an example of this environment Jeremy mentioned that AT&T provisions 12PB of storage a month.

What’s needed for this new platform is a new type of storage built for the 3rd platform but taking advantage of current enterprise storage characteristics. This is ViPR (more on that later)

John comes by way of Huawei, Nortel and myriad others and offers a broad insight to the way forward for EMC. It looks like a bright future ahead if they can do half of what John has outlined.

John talked about the intersections between the carrier market (or services), enterprise IT and consumer market. There is convergence between these regions and at each of these intersections new technology is going to answer many of the problems which exist. For instance in the carrier space:

The amount of information they gather is frightening they know everything about you. Pivotal will be the key here because its good at 1) ability to correlate information across different information sources. Most carriers have a whole bunch of disparate information stores; and 2) It’s not just focused on Big Data as a non-realtime problem but also provides realtime analytics as well.
Capital costs are going down but $/bits are going way down. VMware & Software defined data center is the right way to drive down costs. Today servers are ~50% virtualized but networking is not virtualized at all.
Customers are dissatisfied with service providers (carriers). Again Pivotal is key here. One carrier customer was focused on customer churn and tried to figure out how to minimize this. They used Gemfire’ high speed infrastructure that could watchc all transactions on cell tower infrastructure pick out dropped calls, send it to Greenplum and correlate this with the customer attributes (good or bad), and within 100msec supply an interaction with the customer in to apologize and offer some services to make it better.
Internet is the new wild west –use at your own risk, spoofing websites, respond to email could be anyone, chaos to security. RSA can become the trusted internet provider by looking at the internet holistically, combining information from many customers, aggregating and sharing these interactions to deterimine the trust of every transaction. Trust is becoming a new big data problem.
Hybrid and public cloud is their biggest opportunity but they don’t know how to attack it. VMware and SDDC will evolve to provide orchestrated movement from private to public and closed to open.

The thinking seems pretty straightforward given what they are trying to accomplish and the framework he applied to EMC’s strategy going forward made a lot of sense.

Brian Gallagher did a keynote on enterprise storage new functions and features which covered VMAX, VPLEX, RecoverPoint, and XtremIO/SF/SW. Mentioned RecoverPoint virtual appliance and sort of a statement of direction on being able to move application functionality directly on VMAX. He kind of demoed this with VPLEX running on VMAX.

He also talked about FAST speed of reaction versus the competition, mentioned that FAST provides information about the storage tiering to up to 4 different VMAX arrays. Showed a comparison of VMAX 10K against another prime competitor that looked downright embarrassing. And talked about VMAX cloud edition.

After that 1 on 1 meetings all under strict NDA. But then the big Keynote with Jeremy again and David Goulden President and COO on ViPR. They have implemented software defined storage (SDS). Last week I did a post on SDS trying to layout some of the problems and promises of SDS (please see The promise of SDS post).

But what I missed was the data path transformation that ViPR can do to provide object and HDFS access to traditional and commodity storage systems. ViPR starts out primarily in the control layer providing automated provisioning, self management, across heterogeneous storage pools. With ViPR one can define virtual storage arrays and then configure virtual storage pools across those arrays regardless of the physical infrastructure underneath them.

More on ViPR in a separate post but suffice it to say EMC has been working on this for awhile now. But how it’s positioned with VPLEX and the other storage virtualization capabilities in VMAX and other products is another matter. But it seems they are carving out a space for ViPR between and above the current storage solutions.

End of day one is in the Expo and then cocktail parties… stay tuned for day 2.

Object Storage Summit wrap up

Posted on November 30, 2012December 5, 2012 by Ray in Clustered storage, Energy efficiency, Object storage, System effectiveness

Attended ExecEvent’s first Next-Gen Object Storage Summit in Miami this past week. Learned a lot there and met a lot of the players and movers in this space. Here is a summary of what happened during the summit.

Janae starting a debate on Object Storage

Spent most of the morning of the first day discussing some parameters of object storage in general. Janae got up and talked about 4 major adopters for object storage:

Rapid Responders – these customer have data in long term storage and it just keeps building and needs to be stored in scaleable storage. They believe someday they will need access to it and have no idea when. But when they want it, they want it fast. Rapid responder adoption is based on the unpredictability of access. As such, having the data on scaleable disk object storage makes sense. Some examples include black operations sites with massive surveillance feeds which maybe needed fast sometime after initial analysis and medical archives.
Distributed (content) Enterprises – geographically distributed enterprises with users around the globe that need shared access to data. Distributed enterprises often have 100 or so users sharing data access dispersed around the globe and want shared access to data. Object storage can dispurse the data to provide local caching across the world for better data and meta-data latency. Media and Entertainment are key customers in this space but design shops that follow the sun also have the problem.
Private Cloud(y) – data centers adopt the cloud for a number of reasons but sometimes it’s just mandated. In these cases, direct control over cloud storage with the economics of major web service providers can be an alluring proposition. Some object storage solutions roll in with cloud like economics and on premises solutions and responsiveness, the best of all worlds. Enterprise IT forced to move to the cloud are in this category.
Big Hadoop(ers) – lots of data to analyze but with no understanding of when it will be analyzed. Some Hadoopers can schedule analytics but most don’t know what they will want until they finish with the last analysis. In these cases, having direct access to all the data on an object store can cut setup time considerably.

There were other aspects of Janae’s session but these seemed of most interest. We spent the debating aspects of object storage rest of the morning getting an overview on Scality customers. At the end of the morning we debating aspects of object storage. I thought Jean-Luc from Data Direct Networks had the best view of this when he said object storage is at it’s core, data storage that has scalability, resilience, performance and distribution.

The afternoon sessions were deep dives with the sponsors of the Object Summit.

Nexsan talked about there Assureon product line (EverTrust acquisition). SHA1 and MD5 hashes are made of every object then as objects are replicated to other sites, the hashes are both checked to insure the data hasn’t been corrupted and the are periodically checked (every 90 days) to see if the data is still correct. If it’s corrupted, other replica’s obtained and re-instated. In addition, Assureon has some unique immutable access logs that provide an almost “chain of custody” for objects in the system. Finally, Assureon uses a Microsoft Windows Agent that is Windows Certified and installs without disruption to allow any user (or administrator) to identify files, directories, or file systems to be migrated to the object store.
Cleversafe was up next and talked about their market success with their distributed dsNet® object store and provided some proof points. [Full disclosure: I have recently been under contract with Cleversafe]. For instance, today they have under management over 15 billion objects and deployments with over 70PBs in production They have shipped over 170PB of dsNet storage to customers around the world. Cleversafe has many patents covering their information dispersal algorithms and performance optimization. Some of their sites are in the Federal government installations with a few web intensive clients as well, the most notable being Shutterfly, photo sharing site. Although dsNet is inherently geographical distributed all these “sites” could easily be configured over 1 to 3 locations or more for simpler DR-like support.
Quantum talked about their Lattus product built ontop of Amplidata’s technology. Lattus uses 36TB storage nodes, controller nodes to provide erasure coding for geographical data integrity and NAS gateway nodes. The NAS gateway provides CIFS and NFS to objects. The Latus-C deployment is a forever disk archive for cloud like deployments. This system provides erasure coding for objects in the system which are then dispersed across up to 3 sites (today, with 4 site dispersal under test). Their roadmap Lattus-M is going to be a managed file system offering that operates in conjunction with their StorNext product with ILMlike policy management. Farther out, on the roadmap is a Lattus-H which offers object repository for Hadoop clusters that can gain rapid access to data for analysis.
Scality talked about their success in major multi-tennant environments that need rock-solid reliability and great performance. Their big customers are major web providers that supply email services. Scality is a software product that builds a ring of object storage nodes that supplies the backend storage where the email data is held. Scality is priced on a per end-user capacity stored. Today the product supports RestFul interfaces, CDMI (think email storage interface), Scality File System (based on FUSE, a POSIX compliant Linux file system). NFS interface is coming early next year. With the Scality Ring, nodes can go down but the data is still available with rapid response time. Nodes can be replicated or spread across multiple locations
Data Direct Networks (DDN) is coming at the problem from the High Performance Computing market and have an very interesting scaleable solution with extreme performance. DDN products are featured in many academic labs and large web 2.0 environments. The WOS object storage supports just about any interface you want Java, PHP, Python, RestFULL, NFS/CIFS, S3 and others. They claim very high performance something on the order of 350MB/sec read and 250MB/sec write (I think per node) of object data transfers. Nodes come in 240TB units and one can have up to 256 nodes in a WOS system. One customer uses a WOS node to land local sensor streams then ships it to other locations for analysis.

The next day was spent with Nexsan and DDN talking about their customer base and some of their success stories. We spent the remainder of the morning talking about the startup world which surrounds some object storage technology and the inhibiters to broader adoption of the technology.

In the end there’s a lot of education needed to jump start this market place. Education about both the customer problems that can be solved with object stores and the product differences that are out there today. I argued (forcefully) that what’s needed to accelerate adoption was some standard interface protocol that all object storage systems could utilize. Such a standard protocol would enable a more rapid ecosystem build out and ultimately more enterprise adoption.

One key surprise to me was that the problems their customers are seeing is something all IT customers will have some day. Jean-Luc called it the democratization of the HPC problems. Big Data is driving object storage requirements into the enterprise in a big way…

Comments?

HDS Influencer Summit wrap up

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Decision making, Disk storage, Executive leadership, File Storage, Information economy, Object storage, Server virtualization, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage availability, storage economics, Strategic planning, System effectiveness

[Sorry for the length, it was a long day] There was an awful lot of information suppied today. The morning sessions were all open but most of the afternoon was under NDA.

Jack Domme, HDS CEO started the morning off talking about the growth in HDS market share. Another 20% y/y growth in revenue for HDS. They seem to be hitting the right markets with the right products. They have found a lot of success in emerging markets in Latin America, Africa and Asia. As part of this thrust into emerging markets HDS is opening up a manufacturing facility in Brazil and a Sales/Solution center in Columbia.

Jack spent time outlining the infrastructure cloud to content cloud to information cloud transition that they believe is coming in the IT environment of the future. In addition, there has been even greater alignment within Hitachi Ltd and consolidation of engineering teams to tackle new converged infrastructure needs.

Randy DeMont, EVP and GM Global Sales, Services and Support got up next and talked about their success with the channel. About 50% of their revenue now comes from indirect sources. They are focusing some of their efforts to try to attract global system integrators that are key purveyors to Global 500 companies and their business transformation efforts.

Randy talked at length about some of their recent service offerings including managed storage services. As customers begin to trust HDS with their storage they are start considering moving their whole data center to HDS. Randy said this was a $1B opportunity for HDS and the only thing holding them back is finding the right people with the skills necessary to provide this service.

Randy also mentioned that over the last 3-4 years HDS has gained 200-300 new clients a quarter, which is introducing a lot of new customers to HDS technology.

Brian Householder, EVP, WW Marketing, Business Development and Partners got up next and talked about how HDS has been delivering on their strategic vision for the last decade or so. With HUS VM, HDS has moved storage virtualization down market, into a rack mounted 5U storage subsystem.

Brian mentioned that 70% of their customers are now storage virtualized (meaning that they have external storage managed by VSP, HUS VM or prior versions). This is phenomenal seeing as how only a couple of years back this number was closer to 25%. Later at lunch I probed as to what HDS thought was the reason for this rapid adoption, but the only explanation was the standard S-curve adoption rate for new technologies.

Brian talked about some big data applications where HDS and Hitachi Ltd, business units collaborate to provide business solutions. He mentioned the London Summer Olympics sensor analytics, medical imaging analytics, and heavy construction equipment analytics. Another example he mentioned was financial analysis firms usingsatellite images of retail parking lots to predict retail revenue growth or loss. HDS’s big data strategy seems to be vertically focused building on the strength in Hitachi Ltd’s portfolio of technologies. This was the subject of a post-lunch discussion between John Webster of Evaluator group, myself and Brian.

Brian talked about their storage economics professional services engagement. HDS has done over 1200 storage economics engagements and have written books on the topic as well as have iPad apps to support it. In addition, Brian mentioned that in a late The Info Pro survey, HDS was rated number 1 in value for storage products.

Brian talked some about HDS strategic planning frameworks one of which was an approach to identify investments to maximize share of IT spend across various market segments. Since 2003 when HDS was 80% hardware revenue company to today where they are over 50% Software and Services revenue they seem to have broaden their portfolio extensively.

John Mansfield, EVP Global Solutions Strategy and Development and Sean Moser, VP Software Platforms Product Management spoke next and talked about HCP and HNAS integration over time. It was just 13 months ago that HDS acquired BlueArc and today they have integrated BlueArc technology into HUS VM and HUS storage systems (it was already the guts of HNAS).

They also talked about the success HDS is having with HCP their content platform. One bank they are working with plans to have 80% of their data in an HCP object store.

In addition there was a lot of discussion on UCP Pro and UCP Select, HDS’s converged server, storage and networking systems for VMware environments. With UCP Pro the whole package is ordered as a single SKU. In contrast, with UCP Select partners can order different components and put it together themselves. HDS had a demo of their UCP Pro orchestration software under VMware vSphere 5.1 vCenter that allowed VMware admins to completely provision, manage and monitor servers, storage and networking for their converged infrastructure.

They also talked about their new Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage which is an implementation of a Flash JBOD using MLC NAND but with extensive Hitachi/HDS intellectual property. Together with VSP microcode changes, the new flash JBOD provides great performance (1 Million IOPS) in a standard rack. The technology was developed specifically by Hitachi for HDS storage systems.

Mike Walkey SVP Global Partners and Alliances got up next and talked about their vertical oriented channel strategy. HDS is looking for channel partners perspective the questions that can expand their reach to new markets, providing services along with the equipment and that can make a difference to these markets. They have been spending more time and money on vertical shows such as VMworld, SAPhire, etc. rather than horizontal storage shows (such as SNW). Mike mentioned key high level partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, and SAP as helping to drive solutions into these markets.

Hicham Abhessamad, SVP, Global Services got up next and talked about the level of excellence available from HDS services. He indicated that professional services grew by 34% y/y while managed services grew 114% y/y. He related a McKinsey study that showed that IT budget priorities will change over the next couple of years away from pure infrastructure to more analytics and collaboration. Hicham talked about a couple of large installations of HDS storage and what they are doing with it.

There were a few sessions of one on ones with HDS executives and couple of other speakers later in the day mainly on NDA topics. That’s about all I took notes on. I was losing steam toward the end of the day.

Comments?

One day with HDS

Posted on November 11, 2011November 14, 2011 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Corporate growth, Data analytics, Data growth, Disk storage, Executive leadership, File Storage, Information economy, Object storage, Server virtualization, SSD storage, Storage architecture, storage economics, Storage Features, Strategy

HDS CEO Jack Domme shares the company’s vision and strategy with Influencer Summit attendees #HDSday by HDScorp

Attended #HDSday yesterday in San Jose. Listened to what seemed like the majority of the executive team. The festivities were MCed by Asim Zaheer, VP Corp and Product Marketing, a long time friend and employee, that came to HDS with the acquisition of Archivas five or so years ago. Some highlights of the day’s sessions are included below.

The first presenter was Jack Domme, HDS CEO, and his message was that there is a new, more aggressive HDS, focused on executing and growing the business.

Jack said there will be almost a half a ZB by 2015 and ~80% of that will be unstructured data. HDS firmly believes that much of this growing body of data today lives in silos, locked into application environments and can’t become truly information until it can be liberated from this box. Getting information out of the unstructured data is one of the key problems facing the IT industry.

To that end, Jack talked about the three clouds appearing on the horizon:

infrastructure cloud – cloud as we know and love it today where infrastructure services can be paid for on a per use basis, where data and applications move seemlessly across various infrastructural boundaries.
content cloud – this is somewhat new but here we take on the governance, analytics and management of the millions to billions pieces of content using the infrastructure cloud as a basic service.
information cloud – the end game, where any and all data streams can be analyzed in real time to provide information and insight to the business.

Jack mentioned the example of when Japan had their earthquake earlier this year they automatically stopped all the trains operating in the country to prevent further injury and accidents, until they could assess the extent of track damage. Now this was a specialized example in a narrow vertical but the idea is that the information cloud does that sort of real-time analysis of data streaming in all the time.

For much of the rest of the day the executive team filled out the details that surrounded Jack’s talk.

For example Randy DeMont, Executive VP & GM Global Sales, Services and Support talked about the new, more focused sales team. On that has moved to concentrate on better opportunities and expanded to take on new verticals/new emerging markets.

Then Brian Householder, SVP WW Marketing and Business Development got up and talked about some of the key drivers to their growth:

Current economic climate has everyone doing more with less. Hitachi VSP and storage virtualization is a unique position to be able to obtain more value out of current assets, not a rip and replace strategy. With VSP one layers better management on top of your current infrastructure, that helps get more done with the same equipment.
Focus on the channel and verticals are starting to pay off. More than 50% of HDS revenues now come from indirect channels. Also, healthcare and life sciences are starting to emerge as a crucial vertical for HDS.
Scaleability of their storage solutions is significant. Used to be a PB was a good sized data center but these days we are starting to talk about multiple PBs and even much more. I think earlier Jack mentioned that in the next couple of years HDS will see their first 1EB customer.

~~Mark~~ Mike Gustafson, SVP & GM NAS (former CEO BlueArc) got up and talked about the long and significant partnership between the two companies regarding their HNAS product. He mentioned that ~30% of BlueArc’s revenue came from HDS. He also talked about some of the verticals that BlueArc had done well in such as eDiscovery and Media and Entertainment. Now these verticals will become new focus areas for HDS storage as well.

John Mansfield, SVP Global Solutions Strategy and Developmentcame up and talked about the successes they have had in the product arena. Apparently they have over 2000 VSPs intsalled, (announced just a year ago), and over 50% of the new systems are going in with virtualization. When asked later what has led to the acceleration in virtualization adoption, the consensus view was that server virtualization and in general, doing more with less (storage efficiency) were driving increased use of this capability.

Hicham Abdessamad, SVP, Global Services got up and talked about what has been happening in the services end of the business. Apparently there has been a serious shift in HDS services revenue stream from break fix over to professional services (PS). Such service offerings now include taking over customer data center infrastructure and leasing it back to the customer at a monthly fee. Hicham re-iterated that ~68% of all IT initiatives fail, while 44% of those that succeed are completed over time and/or over budget. HDS is providing professional services to help turn this around. His main problem is finding experienced personnel to help deliver these services.

After this there was a Q&A panel of John Mansfield’s team, Roberto Bassilio, VP Storage Platforms and Product Management, Sean Moser, VP Software Products, and Scan Putegnat, VP File and Content Services, CME. There were a number of questions one of which was on the floods in Thailand and their impact on HDS’s business.

Apparently, the flood problems are causing supply disruptions in the consumer end of the drive market and are not having serious repercussions for their enterprise customers. But they did mention that they were nudging customers to purchase the right form factor (LFF?) disk drives while the supply problems work themselves out.

Also, there was some indication that HDS would be going after more SSD and/or NAND flash capabilities similar to other major vendors in their space. But there was no clarification of when or exactly what they would be doing.

After lunch the GMs of all the Geographic regions around the globe got up and talked about how they were doing in their particular arena.

Jeff Henry, SVP &GM Americas talked about their success in the F500 and some of the emerging markets in Latin America. In fact, they have been so successful in Brazil, they had to split the country into two regions.
Niels Svenningsen, SVP&GM EMAE talked about the emerging markets in his area of the globe, primarily eastern Europe, Russia and Africa. He mentioned that many believe Africa will be the next area to take off like Asia did in the last couple of decades of last century. Apparently there are a Billion people in Africa today.
Kevin Eggleston, SVP&GM APAC, talked about the high rate of server and storage virtualization, the explosive growth and heavy adoption of Cloud pay as you go services. His major growth areas were India and China.

The rest of the afternoon was NDA presentations on future roadmap items.

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All in all a good overview of HDS’s business over the past couple of quarters and their vision for tomorrow. It was a long day and there was probably more than I could absorb in the time we had together.

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