Thoughts on Hitachi Data Systems, their products and market

I’ve been following the progress of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) for well over a decade. When I participated in high-end enterprise storage system shootouts as an end-user, HDS routinely placed second against EMC, HP and NetApp in the, and the decision was always a close one. But the storage market has changed, with nimble startups innovating around established competitors and industry giants flexing their marketing muscles.

Where Does HDS Fit?

Concerned with the question of where HDS fits in this new market, I was pleased to be invited to join the company at their Sefton Park, UK briefing center to get some answers. After two days of intense briefing and discussion, I remain unsure of HDS’ future: The company impressed me as always with their technology, but it takes more than a few good people and products to compete effectively.

I always respected HDS and its products, but they remain stubbornly fixated on the high end of the market. The HDS USP/VSP may be the only really credible competitor to the EMC Symmetrix in the stratosphere of enterprise storage, but these products are analogous to the Airbus A380 and Boeing 747. No one expects them to go away any time soon, and they represent a nexus of innovation and profitability, but the market as a whole has moved on.

Ask an application developer about the infrastructure of their dreams and they’ll start talking scale-out platforms that sound awfully cloudy. The Symmetrix and USP/VSP are the mainframes of storage, and will be desired and required for certain use cases for decades to come. But CIOs are much more interested in the next wave of applications that their businesses will grow on in the future, and these applications need something totally different: A storage platform.

HCP: Positioned for the Next Generation

The best move HDS ever made was acquiring Archivas, developer of what is now known as the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). A crossover between content-addressable storage (CAS) and the new generation of cloud storage systems, HCP is an excellent product for next-generation enterprise applications, with an HTTP/REST interface, object-level metadata-driven storage, and solid credentials for reliability.

The more I learn about HCP, the more I feel that EMC made a mistake by developing an entirely-new cloud storage platform (Atmos) rather than further developing their CAS system (Centera). HDS remained committed to HCP, and the result better matches the needs of enterprise applications than either of EMC’s products. I remain skeptical of HCP as a public cloud platform, but would not hesitate to recommend it for internal use cases.

HDS’ Data Ingestor (HDI) shows how the HCP platform can benefit an enterprise environment. As a NAS gateway, HDI pulls data from “the edge” (remote offices, file servers, and other applications) and stores it in a core HCP repository. This allows enterprise data to be better managed, protected, and manipulated than traditional distributed storage solutions. HDS is pitching HDI as an alternative for remote office backup, but it is really an example of the next-generation storage platforms enterprise CIOs wish they had today.

The Hitachi Clinical Repository vividly demonstrates what this future storage platform looks like. HDS surrounded the HCP with integration points for electronic health records applications and systems, allowing hospitals and other healthcare organizations to handle this rapidly-expanding data set. Departments as diverse as payroll and radiology can share the same platform, tracking and organizing data across applications and locations. The Clinical Repository at once demonstrates the strength of the HCP technology, the strategic value of integrated storage platforms, and the fact that HDS will not be left behind in this new world. Bravo!

Serious Challenges for HDS

But HDS’ future is not a slam dunk. The company faces serious obstacles in all directions, and it is not clear that they are ready to overcome them.

Let’s start with baggage. HDS is the exact opposite of a startup. This is an industry stalwart with a history of technology stronger than its sales execution; a private organization that must open up and change course without sinking; a company at once supported by and saddled with its link to “the mothership”, Hitachi Limited; and a group of talented people whose pride does not always serve their objectives.

The recent sale of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), a key hard disk drive manufacturer, to Western Digital set some tongues wagging that HDS would be next. But HDS is nothing like HGST: Hitachi is first and foremost a developer and manufacturer of technological products, from televisions to nuclear reactors, and HDS is an integrator and distributor of their storage products. Hitachi could, in theory, decide to exit the storage space, and this would be the end of HDS. But this is highly unlikely. Hitachi is in the IT space for the long haul, with a slate of products that also includes servers and networking gear, and HDS is key to internationalizing this business.

But Hitachi is also an anchor, restricting the flexibility and creativity of HDS, and the curious case of Hitachi’s blade servers is a case in point. As noted, Hitachi is a major server vendor in Japan, and the company has named HDS the international custodian of these products. But HDS lacks the resources to sell into the highly-competitive server market. HDS has little choice but to put on a brave face and try to use these blade servers for their content platform, NAS, and unified “datacenter block” offerings, but there is no way they would have sought this product if not for Hitachi’s influence.

More pressing, however, is the challenge HDS faces with their sales force. Time and again one hears tales of clueless HDS sales reps pushing the same old SAN products to the same old customers rather than talking about HCP and the value of a strategic storage platform. One fellow event attendee remarked that his rep hadn’t ever mentioned HCP and HDI, even though it would have been a perfect fit for his large multi-national corporation. The rep either didn’t know about it or didn’t want to bother rocking the boat, and both are equally damning for HDS’ future growth.

One also senses a certain frustrated pride from some HDS employees, and this can be off-putting. This event was populated by some of the best and brightest representatives the company has to offer, but some continually resorted to a pointless “been there, done that, invented it” grouchiness. To hear them tell it, Hitachi is the secret force behind just about every enterprise storage innovation of the past two decades and their failure to dominate the market is a cruel injustice. But this is patently false: HDS is an innovator to be sure, but they play in a competitive market of equals. They must take responsibility for their own failings and work harder for success rather than whining about pretenders and upstarts.

Stephen’s Stance

As the baseball season begins, I can’t help but compare HDS to a big-budget team like the Chicago Cubs: They have all the tools and talent they need to succeed, but only time will tell how competitive they can be.
HDS should be commended for acquiring and developing the HCP technology, as well as spotting and fostering great new faces like Michael Heffernan, David Merrill, and Dave Wilson. But HDS must execute.

My prescription is simple but difficult: Lose the hubris and really dive into the battle for hearts and minds. Engage thought leaders and customers alike and show them how you can solve business problems rather than blathering on about unrecognized technical superiority. Educate the sales force and better incentivize them to “go strategic” instead of falling back on “speeds-and-feeds” SAN sales, and cut off anyone who isn’t on board. Let Heff and Wilson run free, find more like them, and bring Merrill into every CIO-level meeting.

HDS has to step up and be the healthy competitor for NetApp and EMC that the enterprise storage industry so desperately needs.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Concerning HDS
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

0-100-0

Automotive media like Car and Driver and Top Gear frequently test the maximum performance of cars, racing to 100 mph or beyond, sliding around a skidpad, and slamming on the brakes. These tests can be enlightening when it comes to high-performance cars, and the punishing 0-100-0 test is especially impressive. But what’s the point of hammering an economy car or pickup truck like this? Maximal acceleration and cornering are entirely irrelevant to buyers of commuter cars and work vehicles.

Even though a given test can be conducted, it may not be enlightening. The Tolly report demonstrates two key findings:

1. Although 4-blade configurations perform the same under maximum stress, Cisco UCS performance declines with 6 blades while HP’s remains steady.
2. When using a shared blade uplink, Cisco UCS performance fell by half.

These are not startling results. Cisco blades sometimes need to share one I/O channel, and this can’t match the performance of an HP blade with dedicated I/O. Would it shock you to learn that a one-gallon bucket requires twice as many trips to the well as one that holds two gallons? Does it shock anyone to learn that a V6-powered Toyota RAV4 accelerates quicker than a four cylinder Honda CR-V? HP’s c7000 is bigger than Cisco’s UCS and offers more I/O channels, so HP beats Cisco whenever larger configurations with more I/O are tested.

Innocent Benchmarks

Greta examines the marks on an 18th century cooper's bench

I’ll leave the deeper commentary on blade performance to experts like Kevin Houston and Martin Macleod, but these maximum-utilization benchmarks are only half the story. I’m much more interested in how the different approaches to I/O impact everyday (20%-40% load) performance and how oversubscription impacts performance as more blades are installed and workloads are moved around. In automotive terms, I’d like to know how well a car handles in the snow or how economical it is with three or four passengers. These real-world scenarios are much more telling than a test of a few blades under 100% load!

Clearly, HP wanted to call attention to specific shortcomings of a competitor’s product, and it was wise to do so with objective numbers instead of mudslinging and name-calling. I hope that future tests and releases include real-world workloads and logical configurations, not the extreme situation used in this report. The same lesson applies to all tech companies: Simple, objective tests of maximum performance are welcome, but customers need many more metrics!

Note: Along with 9 other independent bloggers, I attended HP’s Blades Tech Day in Houston on February 25 and 26. Most of my travel and living expenses were paid for by HP, and the company provided a small gift bag (pictured here).

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

HP invited bloggers to Colorado to show off their storage offerings at Tech Day 2009

Well that was interesting! I spent Monday and Tuesday with a dozen bloggers in Colorado Springs learning about HP’s key StorageWorks products from the executives and engineers of that storied company. Throughout the event, we listened, asked tough questions, and tweeted incessantly. HP Tech Day generated an avalanche of publicity for the company, including press articles and cries of FUD and misdirection.

Here is the truth: HP and Ivy did a darn fine job of putting together a set of sessions to tell us what they have. They presented folks who really knew their stuff, warts and all. They invited a variety of independent voices and let us ask and say anything we wanted with no expectations, let alone an NDA. This was a stellar event, and every other IT company should be asking why they didn’t do it first.

Won’t Be Fooled

But what was HP Tech Day really all about? Did they brainwash us into thinking the EVA was exciting? Did HP hoodwink and misdirect us from noticing the gaps and overlaps in their product line? Were we dazzled enough to no longer question their storage strategy? Of course not! Robin Harris has seen it all before. Rich Brambley can dissect a presentation with the best of them. Nigel Poulton questions everything he sees. This was not a love-fest, and there were some seriously uncomfortable moments for the HP crew.

We were all savvy enough to know what the score was: HP (and especially their StorageWorks product line) has never received much press or blogger attention. They invited us in to spread the word about their products and get blog exposure. And it worked! The storage Twitter-sphere was dominated with #HPTechDay postings for days, and attendees did indeed blog about the stuff they saw. It was a success from HP’s perspective, and now that we know more about their products we will likely cover them in the future.

I personally never blogged much about HP products. I compared them to Ford, called one product an all-time cool flop, and covered their acquisition of LeftHand and Ibrix, but that’s about it. I didn’t even notice that they had started selling LSI’s StoreAge-based virtualization platform, and didn’t know enough about their other product releases over the last two years to mention them. If it hadn’t been for Calvin Zito and the HP Tech Day, I probably wouldn’t mention them in the future, either. They just weren’t on my radar.

We Were Educated

This has changed as a result of Tech Day. I now know that EVA is still pretty much what I thought it was but that it is fairly simple to configure. I now know that HP has two lines of deduplication appliances, and that one is homegrown. I now know that HP develops and sells a FC SAN virtualization platform based on the LSI/StoreAge product. This was great product exposure for HP: Even though I still don’t think I’ll focus on these offerings, at least I now know that they exist.

We also saw some more interesting content: HP plans to leverage their excellent ProLiant server and blade technology to underpin a line of commodity-based storage and consolidated virtualization offerings. This is exciting stuff, and builds on HP’s base and their recent acquisitions. The most interesting concept I saw was a combination of a blade chassis and ultra-dense storage system with VMware ESX, LeftHand, Ibrix, and HP’s management software. They definitely plan to challenge Cisco/EMC and IBM in this market.

But the best part of the event was the people of HP. The company was smart enough to bring in the techies rather than executive marketing droids. They gave us straight and honest answers about their product capabilities and their place within the company, sometimes to the chagrin of others in the room. We saw conflicting definitions, product line overlaps, internal competition, and got a feel for the realities of this massive company. Every company is like this, but most would never admit what we already know. By not showering us with slick FUD, HP won our respect in a way that I would not have thought possible.

Colorado Take-Away

The event was great. Every other IT company should wise up and do the same. But I bet they won’t have the nerve to do it as openly, and I expect HP will be more careful next time too. As for HP’s products, let me lay out my honest opinion:

1. LeftHand was a bargain. HP could replace their entire sub-XP block storage product line with LeftHand variants based on commodity Intel hardware. I think they should.
2. Ibrix is too new to judge, but will likely take a seat next to LeftHand in a unified commodity-based scale-out SAN/NAS platform.
3. I hope HP hasn’t lost focus on their excellent Hitachi-based XP line, since it’s the only challenger they have to EMC Symmetrix at the high end of the market.
4. HP’s excellent server and blade hardware should be leveraged throughout the company and oddball hardware should be curtailed.
5. HP has an interesting lineup of Windows Storage Server and Windows Home Server hardware aimed at the low-end SOHO and SMB market. I’m not a Windows hater, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a super-low-end LeftHand variant there too?
6. I wonder if HP’s home-grown in-line deduplication (the D2D line) could replace the Sepaton-sourced post-process VLS line or vice-versa if an acquisition of that company happens.
7. I don’t “get” SVSP, the LSI/StoreAge SAN virtualization platform. It’s nice and it seems to work, but why introduce a FC SAN virtualization platform at this point? Maybe it sells when integrated with EVA, but not as a standalone product.
8. Where are all the storage arrays that use 2.5″ disk drives that HP talked about over the last few years? And where are the flash solid state drives?
9. They were like deer in the headlights with no story when I asked about sub-LUN automated tiered storage since even full-LUN automation has not yet been released. Might EMC get there first?
10. As for the absence of DCB and FCoE, HP seems to think that Virtual Connect and Flex-10 are good enough for now. HP will OEM a CNA soon and might possibly consider the Cisco Nexus 4000. Maybe. They had better have a more-convincing story when this stuff takes off next year!
11. Most importantly, where is the cloud strategy? I applaud HP for not overusing the current buzzword, but it almost seems like they are avoiding the topic entirely.

I am left thinking that HP is like a boxed puzzle. All of the pieces are there, but they haven’t been put into place yet. Let’s hope Dave Donatelli and his crew can help them work it out when he takes his post as czar of servers, networking, and storage next year. For now, I’ve gained a lot of respect for the people of HP and a pile of knowledge about their storage products. And HP has gained my attention.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | The Truth About HP’s Tech Day
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.