Has latency become the key metric? SPC-1 LRT results – chart of the month

I was at EMCworld a couple of months back and they were showing off a preview of the next version VNX storage, which was trying to achieve a million IOPS with under a millisecond latency.  Then I attended NetApp’s analyst summit and the discussion at their Flash seminar was how latency was changing the landscape of data storage and how flash latencies were going to enable totally new applications.

One executive at NetApp mentioned that IOPS was never the real problem. As an example, he mentioned one large oil & gas firm that had a peak IOPS of 35K.

Also, there was some discussion at NetApp of trying to come up with a way of segmenting customer applications by latency requirements.  Aside from high frequency trading applications, online payment processing and a few other high-performance database activities, there wasn’t a lot that could easily be identified/quantified today.

IO latencies have been coming down for years now. Sophisticated disk only storage systems have been lowering latencies for over a decade or more.   But since the introduction of SSDs it’s been a whole new ballgame.  For proof all one has to do is examine the top 10 SPC-1 LRT (least response time, measured with workloads@10% of peak activity) results.

Top 10 SPC-1 LRT results, SSD system response times

 

In looking over the top 10 SPC-1 LRT benchmarks (see Figure above) one can see a general pattern.  These systems mostly use SSD or flash storage except for TMS-400, TMS 320 (IBM FlashSystems) and Kaminario’s K2-D which primarily use DRAM storage and backup storage.

Hybrid disk-flash systems seem to start with an LRT of around 0.9 msec (not on the chart above).  These can be found with DotHill, NetApp, and IBM.

Similarly, you almost have to get to as “slow” as 0.93 msec. before you can find any disk only storage systems. But most disk only storage comes with a latency at 1msec or more. Between 1 and 2msec. LRT we see storage from EMC, HDS, HP, Fujitsu, IBM NetApp and others.

There was a time when the storage world was convinced that to get really good response times you had to have a purpose built storage system like TMS or Kaminario or stripped down functionality like IBM’s Power 595.  But it seems that the general purpose HDS HUS, IBM Storwize, and even Huawei OceanStore are all capable of providing excellent latencies with all SSD storage behind them. And all seem to do at least in the same ballpark as the purpose built, TMS RAMSAN-620 SSD storage system.  These general purpose storage systems have just about every advanced feature imaginable with the exception of mainframe attach.

It seems nowadays that there is a trifurcation of latency results going on, based on underlying storage:

  • DRAM only systems at 0.4 msec to ~0.1 msec.
  • SSD/flash only storage at 0.7 down to 0.2msec
  • Disk only storage at 0.93msec and above.

The hybrid storage systems are attempting to mix the economics of disk with the speed of flash storage and seem to be contending with all these single technology, storage solutions. 

It’s a new IO latency world today.  SSD only storage systems are now available from every major storage vendor and many of them are showing pretty impressive latencies.  Now with fully functional storage latency below 0.5msec., what’s the next hurdle for IT.

Comments?

Image: EAB 2006 by TMWolf

 

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Super long term archive

Read an article this past week in Scientific American about a new fused silica glass storage device from Hitachi Ltd., announced last September. The new media is recorded with lasers burning dots which represent binary one or leaving spaces which represents binary 0 onto the media.

As can be seen in the photos above, the data can readily be read by microscope which makes it pretty easy for some future civilization to read the binary data. However, knowing how to decode the binary data into pictures, documents and text is another matter entirely.

We have discussed the format problem before in our Today’s data and the 1000 year archive as well as Digital Rosetta stone vs. 3D barcodes posts. And this new technology would complete with the currently available, M-disc long term achive-able, DVD technology from Millenniata which we have also talked about before.

Semi-perpetual storage archive!!

Hitachi tested the new fused silica glass storage media at 1000C for several hours which they say indicates that it can survive several 100 million years without degradation. At this level it can provide a 300 million year storage archive (M-disc only claims 1000 years).   They are calling their new storage device, “semi-perpetual” storage.  If 100s of millions of years is semi-perpetual, I gotta wonder what perpetual storage might look like.

At CD recording density, with higher densities possible

They were able to achieve CD levels of recording density with a four layer approach. This amounted to about 40Mb/sqin.  While DVD technology is on the order of 330Mb/sqin and BlueRay is ~15Gb/sqin, but neither of these technologies claim even a million year lifetime.   Also, there is the possibility of even more layers so the 40Mb/sqin could double or quadruple potentially.

But data formats change every few years nowadays

My problem with all this is the data format issue, we will need something like a digital rosetta stone for every data format ever conceived in order to make this a practical digital storage device.

Alternatively we could plan to use it more like an analogue storage device, with something like a black and white or grey scale like photographs of  information to be retained imprinted in the media.  That way, a simple microscope could be used to see the photo image.  I suppose color photographs could be implemented using different plates per color, similar to four color magazine production processing. Texts could be handled by just taking a black and white photo of a document and printing them in the media.

According to a post I read about the size of the collection at the Library of Congress, they currently have about 3PB of digital data in their collections which in 650MB CD chunks would be about 4.6M CDs.  So if there is an intent to copy this data onto the new semi-perpetual storage media for the year 300,002012 we probably ought to start now.

Another tidbit to add to the discussion at last months Hitachi Data Systems Influencers Summit, HDS was showing off some of their recent lab work and they had an optical jukebox on display that they claimed would be used for long term archive. I get the feeling that maybe they plan to commercialize this technology soon – stay tuned for more

 

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Image: Hitachi.com website (c) 2012 Hitachi, Ltd.,

HDS Influencer Summit wrap up

[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?

Latest SPC-1 results – IOPS vs drive counts – chart-of-the-month

Scatter plot of SPC-1  IOPS against Spindle count, with linear regression line showing Y=186.18X + 10227 with R**2=0.96064
(SCISPC111122-004) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

[As promised, I am trying to get up-to-date on my performance charts from our monthly newsletters. This one brings us current up through November.]

The above chart plots Storage Performance Council SPC-1 IOPS against spindle count.  On this chart, we have eliminated any SSD systems, systems with drives smaller than 140 GB and any systems with multiple drive sizes.

Alas, the regression coefficient (R**2) of 0.96 tells us that SPC-1 IOPS performance is mainly driven by drive count.  But what’s more interesting here is that as drive counts get higher than say 1000, the variance surrounding the linear regression line widens – implying that system sophistication starts to matter more.

Processing power matters

For instance, if you look at the three systems centered around 2000 drives, they are (from lowest to highest IOPS) 4-node IBM SVC 5.1, 6-node IBM SVC 5.1 and an 8-node HP 3PAR V800 storage system.  This tells us that the more processing (nodes) you throw at an IOPS workload given similar spindle counts, the more efficient it can be.

System sophistication can matter too

The other interesting facet on this chart comes from examining the three systems centered around 250K IOPS that span from ~1150 to ~1500 drives.

  • The 1156 drive system is the latest HDS VSP 8-VSD (virtual storage directors, or processing nodes) running with dynamically (thinly) provisioned volumes – which is the first and only SPC-1 submission using thin provisioning.
  • The 1280 drive system is a (now HP) 3PAR T800 8-node system.
  • The 1536 drive system is an IBM SVC 4.3 8-node storage system.

One would think that thin provisioning would degrade storage performance and maybe it did but without a non-dynamically provisioned HDS VSP benchmark to compare against, it’s hard to tell.  However, the fact that the HDS-VSP performed as well as the other systems did with much lower drive counts seems to tell us that thin provisioning potentially uses hard drives more efficiently than fat provisioning, the 8-VSD HDS VSP is more effective than an 8-node IBM SVC 4.3 and an 8-node (HP) 3PAR T800 systems, or perhaps some combination of these.

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The full SPC performance report went out to our newsletter subscriber’s last November.  [The one change to this chart from the full report is the date in the chart’s title was wrong and is fixed here].  A copy of the full report will be up on the dispatches page of our website sometime this month (if all goes well). However, you can get performance information now and subscribe to future newsletters to receive these reports even earlier by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of block or SAN storage performance covering SPC-1&-2 (top 30) and ESRP (top 20) results please consider purchasing our recently updated SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of SPC results or any of our other storage system performance discussions.

Comments?

Top 10 blog posts for 2011

Merry Christmas! Buon Natale! Frohe Weihnachten! by Jakob Montrasio (cc) (from Flickr)
Merry Christmas! Buon Natale! Frohe Weihnachten! by Jakob Montrasio (cc) (from Flickr)

Happy Holidays.

I ranked my blog posts using a ratio of hits to post age and have identified with the top 10 most popular posts for 2011 (so far):

  1. Vsphere 5 storage enhancements – We discuss some of the more interesting storage oriented Vsphere 5 announcements that included a new DAS storage appliance, host based (software) replication service, storage DRS and other capabilities.
  2. Intel’s 320 SSD 8MB problem – We discuss a recent bug (since fixed) which left the Intel 320 SSD drive with only 8MB of storage, we presumed the bug was in the load leveling logic/block mapping logic of the drive controller.
  3. Analog neural simulation or digital neuromorphic computing vs AI – We talk about recent advances to providing both analog (MIT) and digital versions (IBM) of neural computation vs. the more traditional AI approaches to intelligent computing.
  4. Potential data loss using SSD RAID groups – We note the possibility for catastrophic data loss when using equally used SSDs in RAID groups.
  5. How has IBM researched changed – We examine some of the changes at IBM research that have occurred over the past 50 years or so which have led to much more productive research results.
  6. HDS buys BlueArc – We consider the implications of the recent acquisition of BlueArc storage systems by their major OEM partner, Hitachi Data Systems.
  7. OCZ’s latest Z-Drive R4 series PCIe SSD – Not sure why this got so much traffic but its OCZ’s latest PCIe SSD device with 500K IOPS performance.
  8. Will Hybrid drives conquer enterprise storage – We discuss the unlikely possibility that Hybrid drives (NAND/Flash cache and disk drive in the same device) will be used as backend storage for enterprise storage systems.
  9. SNIA CDMI plugfest for cloud storage and cloud data services – We were invited to sit in on a recent SNIA Cloud Data Management Initiative (CDMI) plugfest and talk to some of the participants about where CDMI is heading and what it means for cloud storage and data services.
  10. Is FC dead?! – What with the introduction of 40GbE FCoE just around the corner, 10GbE cards coming down in price and Brocade’s poor YoY quarterly storage revenue results, we discuss the potential implications on FC infrastructure and its future in the data center.

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I would have to say #3, 5, and 9 were the most fun for me to do. Not sure why, but #10 probably generated the most twitter traffic. Why the others were so popular is hard for me to understand.

Comments?

HDS buys BlueArc

wall o' storage (fisheye) by ChrisDag (cc) (From Flickr)
wall o' storage (fisheye) by ChrisDag (cc) (From Flickr)

Yesterday, HDS announced that they had closed on the purchase of BlueArc their NAS supplier for the past 5 years or so.  Many commentators mentioned that this was a logical evolution of their ongoing OEM agreement, how the timing was right and speculated on what the purchase price might have been.   If you are interested in these aspects of the acquisition, I would refer you to the excellent post by David Vellante from Wikibon on the HDS BlueArc deal.

Hardware as a key differentiator

In contrast, I would like to concentrate here on another view of the purchase, specifically on how HDS and Hitachi, Ltd. have both been working to increase their product differentiation through advanced and specialized hardware (see my post on Hitachi’s VSP vs VMAX and for more on hardware vs. software check out Commodity hardware always loses).

Similarly, BlueArc shared this philosophy and was one of the few NAS vendors to develop special purpose hardware for their Titan and Mercury systems to specifically speedup NFS and CIFS processing.  Most other NAS systems use more general purpose hardware and as a result,  a majority of their R&D investment focuses on software functionality.

But not BlueArc, their performance advantage was highly dependent on specifically designed FPGAs and other hardware.  As such, they have a significant hardware R&D budget to continue their maintain and leverage their unique hardware advantage.

From my perspective, this follows what HDS and Hitachi, Ltd., have been doing all along with the USP, USP-V,  and now their latest entrant the VSP.  If you look under the covers at these products you find a plethora of many special purpose ASICs, FPGAs and other hardware that help accelerate IO performance.

BlueArc and HDS/Hitachi, Ltd. seem to be some of the last vendors standing that still believe that hardware specialization can bring value to data storage. From that standpoint, it makes an awful lot of sense to me to have HDS purchase them.

But others aren’t standing still

In the mean time, scale out NAS products continue to move forward on a number of fronts.  As readers of my newsletter know, currently the SPECsfs2008 overall performance winner is a scale out NAS solution using 144 nodes from EMC Isilon (newsletter signup is above right or can also be found here).

The fact that now HDS/Hitachi, Ltd. can bring their considerable hardware development skills and resources to bear on helping BlueArc develop and deploy their next generation of hardware is a good sign.

Another interesting tidbit was HDS’s previous purchase of ParaScale which seems to have some scale out NAS capabilities of its own.  How this all gets pulled together within HDS’s product line will need to be seen.

In any event, all this means that the battle for NAS isn’t over and is just moving to a higher level.

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Comments?

Initial impressions on Spring SNW/Santa Clara

I heard storage beers last nite was quite the party, sorry I couldn’t make it but I did end up at the HDS customer reception which was standing room only and provided all the food and drink I could consume.

Saw quite a lot of old friends too numerous to mention here but they know who they are.

As for technology on display there was some pretty impressive stuff.

Verident card (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc.
Verident card (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc.

Lots of great technology on display there.

Virident tachIOn SSD

One product that caught my eye was from Virident, their tachIOn SSD. I called it a storage subsystem on a board.  I had never talked with them before but they have been around for a while using NOR storage but now are focused on NAND.

Their product is a fully RAIDed storage device using flash aware RAID 5 parity locations, their own wear leveling and other SSD control software and logic with replaceable NAND modules.

Playing with this device I felt like I was swapping drives of the future. Each NAND module stack has a separate controller and supports high parallelism.  Talking with Shridar Subramanian, VP of marketing, he said the product is capable of over 200K IOPS running a fully 70% read:30% write workload at full capacity.

They have a Capacitor backed DRAM buffer which is capable of uploading the memory buffer to NAND after a power failure. It plugs into a PCIe slot and uses less than 25W of power, in capacities of 300-800GB.  It requires a software driver, they currently only support Linux and VMware (a Linux varient) but Windows and other O/Ss are on the way

Other SSDs/NAND storage

Their story was a familair refrain throughout the floor, lots of SSD/NAND technology coming out, in various formfactors.  I saw one system using SSDs from Viking Modular Systems that fit into a DRAM DIMM slot and supported a number of SSDs behind a SAS like controller. Also requiring a SW driver.

(c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc.
(c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc.

Of course TMS, Fusion-IO, Micron, Pliant and others were touting their latest SSD/Nand based technology showing off their latest solutions and technology.   For some reason lots of SSD’s at this show.

Naturally, all the other storage vendors were there Dell, HDS, HP, EMC, NetApp and IBM. IBM was showing off Watson, their new AI engine that won at Jeopardy.

And then there was cloud, …

Cloud was a hot topic as well. Saw one guy in the corner I have talked about before StorSimple which is a cloud gateway provider.  They said they are starting to see some traction in the enterprise. Apparently enterprise are starting to adopt cloud – who knew?

Throw in a few storage caching devices, …

Then of course there was the data caching products which ranged from the relaunched DataRAM XcelASAN to Marvel’s new DragonFLY card.  DragonFLY provides a cache on a PCI-E card which DataRAM is a FC caching appliance, all pretty interesting.

… and what’s organic storage?

And finally, Scality came out of the shadows with what they are calling an organic object storage device.  The product reminded me of Bycast (now with NetApp) and Archivas (now with HDS) in that they had a RAIN architecture, with mirrored data in an object store interface.  I asked them what makes them different and Jerome Lecat, CEO said they are relentlessly focused on performance and claims they can retrieve an object in under 40msec.  My kind of product.  I think they deserve a deeper dive sometime later.

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Probably missed a other  vendors but these are my initial impressions.  For some reason I felt right at home swapping NAND drive modules,…

Comments

 

Hitachi-HDS Strategy Sessions in Japan

Went to Tokyo at HDS’s expense this week and had a great time talking with Hitachi and HDS about their current and future product portfolio.

Gaggle of Analysts (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Gaggle of Analysts (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Arrived Monday evening and went out for an informal dinner.  In the photo foreground one can see  John Webster (Evaluator Group), Andrew Reichman (Forrester Research), Richard Jew (HDS), and the back of Sean Moser (HDS).   In the background, Claus Egge, (Claus Egge), Laura DuBois and Nick Sundby (both from IDC).  We had a great Japanese dinner, close to the hotel.

Monday started off with a ride on Japan’s Bullet Train, the Shinkansen.  Some debate as to whether it went 300 or 500 Km/hour but it seemed fast enough and got us from our hotel near Tokyo’s Shinagawa station to Odawara in under an hour.  The train was quiet, comfortable and quick.

Shinkansen coming to a stop (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Shinkansen coming to a stop (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

In the picture at the station one can see Christophe Bertrand (HDS) and Tony Lock (Freeform Dynamics) as well as Laura and Nick (IDC) in the background.  Another picture of the Shinkansen from the return trip.

Shinkansen (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Shinkansen (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Spent the day at Odawara Hitachi’s Customer Demo center listening to Hitachi RSD (hardware division) and HDS talk about the upcoming storage product plans.

Hitachi, the parent company of HDS, is into a lot of technology areas.  We talked briefly about some of these which included hard disk drives, server technology, and telecommunications equipment.  In addition to these info tech arenas, they provide MRIs, construction equipment, energy generation and other equipment.  The bullet trains we were using to get back and forth to the hotel were also manufactured by Hitachi.  It turns out information technology and hard disk drive technology represents just under 30% of Hitachi’s global revenue.

Platter data density history (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Platter data density history (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

They had an interesting historical study of storage technology there. Took some photos.  They also had on display just about every current Hitachi-HDS storage product currently sold as well as some of their prior storage systems.

They held discussions on upcoming products and other capabilities most of which was under NDA.  I and the other analysts had a chance to critique some of their plans with more feedback to come.

The second day was also spent in Odowara but at another facility, with the software division (responsible for HiCommand and other Hitachi software) discussing the next generation of HiCommand and other software functionality.  After lunch we got a chance to tour the factory premises.

Hitachi manufacturers all the PCBs (printed circuit boards) for all HDS storage products in Japan. I believe they said they were manufacturing 7500 PCBs a day across the PCB lines they operate here.  We walked through one PCB line as well as the final assembly and test area for VSP and AMS products. I was pretty impressed with what I saw.  We weren’t able to take many pictures here but I was allowed a few.

Hitachi's PCB line (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Hitachi's PCB line (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

I have seen a lot of assembly areas and test areas and this seemed to be far and away more sophisticated than most.  I have also seen my fair share of ESS (environmental stress screening chambers) but these looked more like waiting rooms than ESS chambers. Everyone looked busy but not to harried. I suppose had it been end of year rather than middle of quarter it might have looked different.

On the metro in Tokyo (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
On the metro in Tokyo (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The last day was spent at Hitachi Central Research Lab (HCRL) in Tokyo. We had to take two Tokyo metro trains to get there. I thought we would have the metro train pushers to “compress” us into the train cars but apparently it just wasn’t that busy, so we were spared that “experience”.

Tokyo Metro Train Ride (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Tokyo Metro Train Ride (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Nonetheless, the ride on the metro lines was fun, loud and crowded.  In the pictures on the platform one can See Michael Hay (Hitachi), Jason Knadler (HDS), Richard, Andrew, Tony and a few other analysts.  In the car, one can readily see Andrew, Nick and Sean. Also the back of Micky Sandorfi’s (HDS) head.  Had lot’s of “close bonding” on that trip.

Hitachi’s Central Research Lab (HCRL) was founded during WWII and has been doing fundamental and business sponsored research there ever since.  It seems like just about everyone we met there had a PhD after their name.  We were shown some of Hitachi’s advanced research in optical interconnects, next generation MRI, explosive’s detection, and other technologies.

One of the highlights of the day’s events though was the tour of the grounds. HCRL is in a campus-like setting with forested areas, hot springs and ponds to no doubt help the scientists invent the next big thing.  We were allowed to take pictures

Plum blossom on HCRL Grounds (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
Plum blossom on HCRL Grounds (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

here and I have included a few of them.  In the plum blossom picture, Mr. IRIE Naohika who led the tour can be easily seen as well as the back of Rajnish Arora (IDC). I think one can see the back of Claus’s and Nick’s heads here as well as Ms. NAKAMURA Yuko.  In the other picture one can see Mr. MAEDA Yuki (HDS) who led most of the trip in Japan and was showing us the way to the lab, as well as bits of Sean, Micky, Rajnish and Tony.

At the entrance to HCRL grounds (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved
At the entrance to HCRL grounds (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

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All in all I had a great trip. We learned a lot about Hitachi-HDS technology and upcoming products. Got to see Tokyo and had a wonderful time. Overall I thought the meetings were productive for both analysts and Hitach-HDS.

The only negative I would have to say was the mad dash through the Shinagawa station with Sean and Yuki to get me to the “Narita Express” train on time, but other than that it was lot’s of fun.