Linda Xu, Vice President – Worldwide Product Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) talks to Pankaj Maru about key data and storage trends, company’s cloud strategy and its impact on product portfolio.
What are the key trends in the data and storage space in recent times?
In recent times, I see three major trends cloud, big data and BYOD. Globally, this year, a lot of adoption is seen in the private cloud. The drive for greater efficiency and cost reduction is seen as the primary reason. Cost is reduced by switching to opex from a capex model. Everyone wants to “do more with less” and with the cloud model, IT can be run much more efficiently.
Big data is the second trend as people want to “do more with less”– cloud helps you“with less” and big data helps you “do more.” A CTO or CIO tries to use technology to do more. In the past with advertising, for example, you would just run an advertisement on a billboard. In the big data world, you can get customer level information around a certain product. With big data, all purchase, travel information and interests can be corelated and mapped together to predict a customer’s emotions at a moment when he is more likely to make a purchase. So big data is used to generate more revenue for business. In the past, advertising was more mass media and now it is targeted individually. That is the basic promise of big data.
The industry though, still has a “wait and see” attitude but as an industry, we need to figure out how to get true value out of big data. The future is definitely very bright but we are just in the process of getting the right data to analyze. Metadata is very important as that can help filter out all the data BYOD, the third trend has been a challenge for IT because all of a sudden people are using mobile devices, regardless of whether they are allowed to or not. The desire to have secure enterprise class solutions to enable BYOD exists. Having an enterprise class BYOD solution is going to drive a lot of the future needs.
How have HDS products and solutions aligned to its cloud strategy? And to what extent do these products have to move to cloud as an offering compared to on-premise?
The cloud strategy was announced about two years ago, which was when we announced the content cloud, information cloud and infrastructure cloud. The vision has never changed though and we are just executing it based on this direction. Our recent announcement is based on the content cloud. We are expanding the content cloud from just the data center and remote offices to mobile devices.
Traditionally, HDS had Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) and these are block based storage systems. Because of the importance of cloud, which is not just about storage but also computing power, convergence is really seen as a big trend. The storage, server and network need to work as a single resource pool which is why we are focusing on Unified Computing Platform (UCP) that is solely designed for the cloud. This is truly a private cloud turnkey solution that we offer. From a portfolio perspective, we have truly expanded way beyond what we had for the cloud.
In which direction do you see the cloud is going?
Most people think security is a key reason for cloud’s unpopularity. I think the bigger issue though is the lack of standards. When you select a provider for the cloud and if the provider goes out of business, what is the standard if the provider used some proprietary technology and how would you transfer to another provider? I think the use of proper standards is one of the inhibitors for cloud adoption. The near term opportunity though, is in private cloud. IT is going to play a major role in transforming their data center into a private cloud and IT as a service will be a big trend. In the last decade, the data center went through a lot of transitions it was consolidated, then virtualized and then automated. Post that, the cloud delivery layer came to allow internal customers to consume IT as a service. In the next two years, there will be a cloud transition.
What does HDS’ cloud strategy mean to enterprises in real terms?
From an enterprise’s standpoint, it wants to analyze data more effectively to target the customer better and get insights faster. We have a very scientific way of quantifying the impact of our solutions. We categorize our costs into 39 different groups such as the stored data cost, different tiers cost, managing data and backup cost. This strategy has been well accepted by our customers and have saved close to 30% of their operational costs by adopting these technologies.
