During the past year, Gartner has released five reports that showcase Hitachi's latest achievements in "MarketScope for High-End Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2007," Gartner's comments include:
"For the year ending December 2006, Hitachi/HDS had the largest revenue gain in the high-end enterprise disk array market of any vendor that Gartner tracks, with a 30.1% year-over-year increase."
"Given that these figures do not include the sales made to or by Hitachi/HDS's partners (HP and Sun), the growth in revenue market share is all the more impressive."
"EMC remains behind the competition in terms of delivering feature functionality, which Gartner considers to be important in this segment. Even though support for a thin-provisioning implementation was announced for the DMX-4, it is not expected until the 1Q08 time frame, leaving EMC behind the technology curve relative to some of its competitors."
"The USP V product introduction (May 2007 announcement; July 2007 general availability) included a thin-provisioning implementation as well as capacity, connectivity, and performance enhancements compared with the previous generation USP product. Although the USP V does not support SATA disks for in-platform tiering, it does support them behind the array in an external, virtualized pool. Extending thin provisioning to include the externally attached arrays is the next step in increasing storage use and end-user cost savings, and Hitachi/HDS has announced plans to release this capability, as well as internal SATA drive support, by YE07."
"Hitachi/HDS made some changes in the structure of its sales organization in 2006, which have been proven to have merit. Additionally, the company has altered its pricing strategy for 2007 by reducing its list prices, which may have the net effect of decreasing the length of the sales cycle. The company still shows reluctance to compete on price, but is arguably making strides toward increased sales. Additional work in the areas of sales and marketing should help the company continue this trend. Although Hitachi/HDS retains its Positive rating, its relative position within the positive category has improved."
Rating: Positive in "HDS, HP and Sun Up the Ante for High-End Storage," Gartner's comments include:
"HDS thin provisioning returns innovation to (the) high-end storage market."
"HDP is a dramatic step forward in high-end storage-array provisioning."
"Recommendation: Users should embrace thin-provisioning technology whenever possible."
"Hitachi brings innovation to the high-end storage market with its next-generation USP V. The systems couple virtualization with new thin-provisioning capabilities. Gartner expects that the financial, operational and environmental benefits of thin provisioning will make it a must-have feature by 2012. The USP V, along with its HP and Sun counterparts-XP24000 and 9990V-combine thin provisioning, space-efficient point-in-time copies, and virtualization in a highly scalable storage system that is operationally and financially appealing."
"With the introduction of thin provisioning, HDS, HP, and Sun have not only provided an attractive upgrade path for their established high-end customers, but an enticing new option for EMC and IBM users as well. EMC and IBM users need to address the issue of costs and risks associated with converting to a new architecture, and EMC and IBM would be wise to examine and publish their roadmaps with regard to their implementation of the thin-provisioning functionality."
"The USP V and its XP24000 and 9990V siblings combine thin provisioning, space-efficient point-in-time copies, and virtualization in a highly scalable storage system that is operationally and financially appealing in the high-end storage market. Thin provisioning has the potential to provide one-time improvements in utilization rates, lower storage acquisition costs, and alter the design and management of storage infrastructures."
"The scalability and virtualization capabilities of USP V, XP24000 and 9990V make them attractive as consolidation platforms."
"HDP: Larger pages also mean that less metadata is needed to describe a virtual volume, which suggests that thin provisioning should scale well."
"The virtualization capabilities of these systems simplify data migrations from installed storage systems to new systems and facilitate consolidation on an application-by-application basis."
Recommendation for Hitachi: Aggressively sell the benefits and savings of thin provisioning, consolidation, virtualization, and robust data protection while in an advantaged position."
"Recommendation for other vendors: Acknowledge that thin provisioning is a transformational technology that will become a must-have feature for high-end disk arrays by 2012. Reprioritize R&D efforts as needed to eliminate thin provisioning as a competitive differentiator."
"These virtual machines minimize cache pollution between servers and improve security when system resources are shared between users."
"Also note that prior to the introduction of these new Next-Gen systems, the USP, XP12000, and 9990 competed effectively against DMX and DS8000 series systems. Therefore, where the performance and scale of USP, XP12000, and 9990 comfortably exceed the needs over the systems' planned service lives and where the economics of these systems are compelling, users should not hesitate to install them."
"When supporting typical online environments...users can expect a 50% improvement over comparably configured predecessor systems."
"The USP V, XP24000, and 9990V share many design elements with their predecessors but, in implementation, include many hardware and architectural improvements."
"The lack of native SATA disks is a non-issue because midrange systems configured with SATA disks can be cost-effectively virtualized behind a USP V, XP24000, or 9990V. Nonetheless, the addition of native SATA drive support later in 2007 will further enhance the appeal of these systems in tiered storage environments."
In "Thin Provisioning Is Revolutionizing Storage Management," Gartner's comments include:
"Thin provisioning, coupled with virtualized back-end disks, improves staff productivity by simplifying storage provisioning and eliminating most tuning activities associated with solving performance problems."
"Thin provisioning takes virtualization to the next evolutionary step by linking space allocation to write activity. The benefits of this evolutionary enhancement are profound, and include improved staff productivity, higher end-user satisfaction rates, increased storage utilization rates, more accurate capacity forecasts, smaller storage system environmental footprints, and lower costs."
"Thin provisioning reduces power and cooling costs by reducing the number of physical disks required to support a given workload. These savings are attributable to improvements in utilization rates and the probability that the performance benefits of thin provisioning will allow for more workloads to be hosted on high-capacity disks instead of high-performance disks. Putting these savings into perspective, increasing utilization rates from 30% to 60% would halve the number of disks needed to support a given workload. Likewise, hosting an application on 500GB serial advanced technology attachment disks, instead of 146GB disks, cuts the number of disks needed by more than a factor of two, for a potential savings in disk power and cooling of more than four times for the above example."
"Insatiable storage growth, coupled with staff shortages and budget constraints, will make thin provisioning a must-have feature once it is implemented by more-established storage vendors."
"Thin provisioning: reduces storage system environmental footprint."
"Thin provisioning and storage consolidation have a symbiotic relationship. Thin provisioning improves the value of storage consolidation by simplifying storage provisioning and changing the focus from provisioning servers to managing free space. Storage consolidation improves the value of thin provisioning by automatically pooling storage that users request but do not use. Pooling storage into large pools benefits staff productivity and the accuracy of storage capacity forecasting."
In "HDS and HP Unveil Thin Provisioning With USP V and XP24000," Gartner's comments include:
"The HDS Universal Storage Platform V and HP XP24000 are bigger, faster, and better than their respective predecessors in every meaningful metric. Of even more importance is these products' support of thin provisioning."
"Application visible performance gains will vary by system configuration and workloads, but will generally equal or exceed 150%, sometimes significantly."
"The USP V and the XP 24000 storage systems combine new packaging, semiconductor technology, and many proven USP/XP design features into more highly scalable and usable storage systems. But the most significant element of these joint announcements is the availability of thin provisioning in a high-end storage system. The recent success of midrange, thin provisioning features demonstrates that there is huge demand for the operational, financial, and environmental benefits of thin provisioning. 3PAR, Compellent, EqualLogic, and Network Appliance have seen their revenue grow even as thin provisioning reduces the amount of disk space initially needed."
"If USP V and XP 24000 thin provisioning proves itself robust and scalable, and HDS and HP are effective in selling these products, the marketplace and competitors will feel an enormous impact."
"These systems will immediately increase end-user use rates and staff productivity. Until EMC and IBM respond with their own implementations of thin-provisioning or equivalent tools, they will feel pressure to more heavily discount their DMX and DS8000 series systems to compensate for the additional capacity that their products will need to provide equivalent manually provisioned solutions."
"With these announcements, HDS and HP have simplified their software pricing methodologies and lowered prices to make both larger configurations and virtualized external storage more appealing."
In "Storage Virtualization: HDS Universal Volume Manager," Gartner's comments include:
"UVM and its tools for consolidation and migration will give HDS a position with no direct competition."
"Hitachi's Universal Volume Manager brings external disk support to its high-end storage array. As a result, it has no direct competition for its integrated heterogeneous virtualization features in the high-end storage array market."
"When Hitachi decided to offer a heterogeneous storage virtualization product, it made a smart move. Unlike competitors that started from scratch to write new controller software, it chose instead to add external storage support to its most robust, most highly featured, most market-proven storage array."
"Organizations that have performed complex consolidations report considerable savings in labor and other costs, along with streamlined operations and improved service levels. General feedback on UVM is positive."
"The EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 and IBM DS8000 systems are the only real competitors for the USP/NSC family, but neither EMC nor IBM supports external storage on these systems. As a result, UVM and the use cases for it have no direct competition in the market, although users can purchase low-cost disks inside DMX-3 and DS8000. IBM does offer the SVC, which like the USP/NSC family is a storage controller that supports external disks, but the SVC is a midrange product, while the broader USP/NSC line competes at a much higher level of scalability and cost. A unique feature of UVM is that it works for mainframe, FICON/ESCON-connected storage. No other product, regardless of scalability, provides heterogeneous virtualization for the mainframe. Finally, EMC's Invista may one day provide competition for UVM, but today, it is a different kind of product, more in the scale of the SVC than the USP/NSC."
"Bottom Line: Users who are already committed to HDS for high-end storage should certainly deploy UVM, if for no other reason than to provide lower-cost storage alternatives under the same layered software tools already deployed. Its migration and consolidation tools will simplify operations but eliminate pricing competition for organizations that have a two-vendor storage policy. Users not committed to HDS and who are considering new high-end storage purchases should include HDS, IBM, and EMC on their shortlists." "UVM license purchases have steadily climbed since its introduction on 7 September 2004. According to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), UVM is ordered on almost half of the USP/NSC arrays sold by the company. Users tend to deploy the license for one or both of two reasons: consolidation and tiered storage."
