Hitachi Storage - Marketing with Management
"We recently marketed with several executives from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a unit of Hitachi (HIT, NR) focused on storage outside of Japan. These
executives included Lewis Winning (VP, Global Sales), Roberto Basilio (Senior Director of Enterprise
Storage Product Management), Steven Tenbarge (VP, Product Marketing), and Laurie Spindler (Director of
IR). This followed Hitachi's recent announcement of 1.) a new high-end storage array (USP V) with more
capacity (247PB) and throughput (3.5 IOPS), 2.) the introduction of thin provisioning functionality
(allowing a customer to not overprovision storage to an application), and 3.) a new Services Oriented
Storage Solutions (SOSS) capability to allow for charge-back related to business needs." (23-May-2007)
HDS Increases the Bar in the High-End by Adding Thin Provisioning
"This morning, HDS made several storage announcements that will
increase pressure on EMC and IBM (NR). It announced 1.) the first high-end storage array from the
top three (EMC, HDS, IBM) that includes thin provisioning (thin provisioning improves capacity
utilization by reducing the need to preallocate too much storage). HDS calls this "Hitachi Dynamic
Provisioning Software". The new high-end array (USP V) has 247PB of capacity, 3.5M IOs per second
(vs. a claimed 700K from EMC), and 4Gbps FC connectivity to the back-end disks; 2.) an expansion of
its Hitachi (HIT, NR) Universal Volume Manager software (for storage virtualization) to enable much
greater capacity; and 3.) its new Services Oriented Storage Solutions (SOSS) that will better enable
charge-back according to business needs. We wonder how thin provisioning, while helpful to
customers, may negatively impact storage unit sales by lowering the incentive to over-provision
storage." (14-May-2007)
