'Controlling TCO is the biggest storage challenge'

Hitachi Data Systems, the storage solution company and wholly-owned
subsidiary of the Tokyo-based global ele-ctronics company Hitachi, is defining
new paradigms in enterprise storage with uni-versal virtualization and universal
replication. Lim Beng Lay, Regional Product Mana-ger, South Asia and India, Hita-chi
Data Systems, was in town to address a meet on the key storage challenges in the
twenty-first century. The 16-year IT-industry veteran spoke to Dataquest about
key opera-tional challenges storage companies are currently facing and Hitachi's
efforts to meet the needs of the network storage market.

What are the key storage challenges today?

Business is demanding more from IT, adding a higher level of complexity to
IT's foundation technology: storage. Capacity per storage system must scale up
to keep up with the unabated data growth, data must be available quickly at the
rate and form that new users and applications need. It is crucial that storage
is optimi-zed to deliver the maximum busi-ness value through application it
drives. End-to-end storage area management and storage-based data management
have become necessities. The key storage challe-nges are to reduce costs, to
align IT with business, to meet user exp-ectations, to bring about change
management successfully, to ensure information security and to integrate
multiple systems.

What are the chief industry trends?

The biggest trend in the storage industry today is consolidation in server
and application sto-rage. The trend is picking up right now and will be the norm
soon. The CIO, today, is looking at delivery service levels that would mitigate
risks and at the same time reduce cost. This is likely to affect Tier 1
application. While both infor-mation and customers have grown, costs still
remain a reason for great concern. The storage industry is asking customers to
consolidate.

What is the next big thing in enterprise storage?

The next big thing in enterprise storage is array virtualization and
partitioning, which will enable precise matching of application requirements to
storage resources, providing improved security for individual applications and
enh-anced functionality. Companies are saddled with an environment that has one
or more of everything. The problem is what do organizations do with its existing
heterogeneous storage investments. Virtualization will help simplify the
environment to single data storage and enhance external capacity. This will
virtualize some of the older technology and make it seamless and give you the
ability to make changes like data migration and cloning without dis-ruptions.
Logical partitioning allo-cates external and internal physical storage resources
and divides the storage into multiple virtual storage machines, which allows
decen-tralized management of allocated resour-ces and ensures efficient
utilization of storage across the platform.

What is HDS doing to take on the future requirements of the industry?

Companies today need storage solutions that scale across multiple locations,
including capacity, perfor-mance, management, platform support and availability.
Hitachi has developed a cohesive solution, leve-raging R&D resources from
across the company to protect prior sto-rage investments and meet the fut-ure
needs of the networked storage market.

We have recently launched the Hitachi TagmaStore that delivers 500 percent
performance advan-tage by optimizing the industry's first management software
for large-scale virtualization and universal replication. The platform is
launched along with a new suit of software delivering large-scale storage
virtualization, up to 32 Petabytes, across heterogeneous storage systems. The
management software will enable Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage platform to
perform logical partition of both the internal and external storage resources.

How has the industry response been to your latest offering?

Controlling total cost of owner-ship is the biggest challenges today. If you
look at the current scenario, it is too expensive to provide com-mon management
solution for fragmented data assets of a corporation. According to analysis by
ITCentrix, an independent CIO consulting firm, the new platform dramatically
reduces management overhead and software licensing costs, at the same time
extending the latest software advances to older or depreciating storage assets.
The unified management structure removes the need for and cost of multiple and
overlapping software products. For example, within a conventional SAN, each
storage device requires indepen-dent replication software. In contrast, the
Universal Replicator software that resides in the Universal Storage Platform
elimina-tes the need for multiple software licenses, upgrades and maintena-nce
contracts, further reducing the total cost of ownership. The response to our new
offering has been really good so far, especially in the last two months.