Former Gartner analyst Josh Krischer, now of fast-growing analyst firm Krischer & Associates, just issued a comprehensive research report: Storage Is Not a Commodity: A Comparison of High-End Storage Subsystems. In this detailed report, Krischer points out how, during the past 20 years, only Hitachi has truly been innovating in enterprise storage while others have been lagging with their aging architectures. Check out the following key report highlights:
- "The leadership in introducing new storage functions (has) passed to Hitachi, which skillfully uses its virtual platform for additional developments."
- "Looking at the architectural developments since the ’90s, it appears that Hitachi was the only company constantly developing its high-end storage subsystems, addressing the changing demands of enterprise customers. Hitachi storage subsystems have been leading for many years in hardware design and several years ago took the lead in functionality as well."
- "As opposed to other vendors, Hitachi has access to researchers and intellectual property from multiple IT disciplines and is not limited to storage only. Hitachi relies on proven cross-pollination research and development techniques that enable it to repurpose IP from one division to another and innovate from within, as opposed to relying on off-the-shelf components and third-party manufacturers. For example, Hitachi designed the Universal Virtualization Layer for the USP back in 1998—six years before the product was actually introduced to market."
- "High-end storage subsystems are not commodity products; there are significant differences between the three storage subsystems from Hitachi, EMC, and IBM."
- "Hitachi, having the fastest turnaround times in the industry, brought to market during the past 20 years new control unit designs approximately every four to five years, with a midlife kicker two years after launching the original product."
- "Virtualization and partitioning are the basis to transform the high-end array control unit into a ubiquitous storage server to support other storage media, such as tape or optical libraries. These features will allow deployments of real LAN-less, server-less backup, embedded de-duplication, or turnkey systems, such as medical scanning and archiving systems. These features increase the functionality gap between high-end and midrange storage systems, which has narrowed over the past few years, and will stem the market share erosion of high-end enterprise systems."
- "The Massively Parallel Universal Star Network Crossbar Switch Architecture supports up to 320 concurrent internal cache and control cache operations, which is 10x maximum number of cache operations of the DMX. The maximum achievable bandwidth of the DMX is below 16 GB/sec, much lower than the 128 GB/sec stated in DMX documentation."
- "The USP V supports some unique features, such as Dynamic Provisioning, Universal Replication, Logical Partitioning, and Large Logical Storage Pools."
- "Hitachi’s cache design is the most advanced in the industry and provides any-to-any connectivity between any host port and disk array. Access to storage can also be load-balanced across multiple host ports since they can all view the same cache image. This provides additional resilience since the failure of any one or two components would not be noticed by the end user. "
- "Only Hitachi is ready to provide customers with a 100 percent data availability guarantee."
- "Hitachi, being a large technology corporation, leverages other branches of technologies in its storage products, such as tailor-made ASIC chips or the Universal Star Network V crossbar switch architecture, which was designed by multiple IT groups within the company."
