Vendor Profile: Hitachi Data Systems

Then came two bits of good fortune: the advent of Fibre Channel SANs and the hubris of competitor EMC. The first brought mainframe storage attachment concepts (though not networked storage) into the distributed-systems world. The latter alienated many high-end storage users and paved the way for HDS to get in the thick of things.

In 2001, HDS owned about 17 percent of the high-end storage market, compared with EMC's 74 percent and IBM's 9 percent, according to Merrill Lynch. By the beginning of 2004, however, the race had tightened, with 42 percent of the market going to EMC, 37 percent to HDS and 27 percent to IBM. Projections show the three closing to within a few percentage points of one another, driven by the pending release of EMC's Symmetrix 7 products, IBM's Power5 microprocessor-based Shark arrays and HDS's just-announced Lightning-3 TagmaStore arrays.

Back-Door Attacks

There have been challenges along the way, of course, including self-serving storage product characterization schemes by leading analyst firms. For example, when Gartner Group classified storage platforms as either "modular" or "monolithic," arguably to promote differentiation among vendor clients, HDS found its Lightning and Thunder arrays pigeonholed in a way that made differentiating them from competitors' wares difficult. In response, Yoshida co-authored a white paper to clarify HDS' product classifications, borrowing the ideas of "core" and "edge" from the networking space. Marketing content aside, the paper is an informative model for developing purpose-built storage capabilities behind specific applications.HDS' latest array, TagmaStore, is a volley across rivals' bows in the battle to dominate heterogeneous storage environments. TagmaStore uses the company's Lightning array port virtualization and crossbar switch architecture, which is state of the art in high-end storage, to provide universal management and pooling services across up to 32 petabytes of storage--including EMC and IBM wares. HDS says that the TagmaStore's on-board storage virtualization and control capabilities will minimize latencies inherent in off-board virtualization schemes, such as IBM's Storage Virtualization Controller (SVC) and EMC's forthcoming Storage Virtualization Router. This claim remains to be proven but could provide a powerful advantage to HDS going forward, especially if IBM and EMC continue to take potshots at each other about whether EMC LUNs can be included in a virtual pool established via IBM SVC.

In another tactical victory, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems will enter OEM agreements with HDS for TagmaStore to provide the high-end storage in their respective storage offerings.

Still, HDS' management story remains less homegrown than imported. The company is a major user of AppIQ's management software, an implementation of SNIA's SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative-Specification), which it has "enhanced" and rebranded as Hitachi System Storage Manager (HSSM). Yoshida says that HSSM improves the visibility of storage on a per-application basis, mapping functions to specific resources.

"HSSM can tell you about the performance of an application and let you deep dive to find hot spots," he says.

When pressed, Yoshida admits that software is an area in which HDS has lagged. While EMC has gone on a software buying spree and IBM announces component after component of its Storage Tank storage-management software, HDS has been quiet about its virtualization and management software development efforts. This arguably was a wise strategy: Over the past two years, hardware companies have outpaced their software counterparts in terms of earnings. But, according to Yoshida, storage is now taking over more server and network functionality, so software is on the front burner again.View From the Front Lines

Andrew Edgar, vice president of storage and systems for Structured Communications, an integrator based in Portland, Ore., likes Yoshida's thinking. For the past five years, HDS has been selling "undisputedly superior hardware in terms of reliability, service and support," Edgar says. But, he adds, low-key messaging by the vendor has required him to do some heavy lifting--the hardware may sell itself in 15 minutes, but explaining its management capabilities and related value proposition can take weeks.

As for the Lightning array, Edgar says a major plus is its virtualized port technology, which lets many servers dynamically share one physical connection. In Fibre Channel SANs, he says HDS' approach obviates zones based on a one-server-to-one-storage-device relationship, which has become the recommended configuration of many leading FC SAN vendors, including EMC. Virtual ports, Edgar says, "give customers flexibility without making their management tasks more difficult."

Although Edgar doesn't think Gartner's monolithic-versus-modular labeling scheme hurt HDS too much, Structured Communications did develop its own analyst service to provide customers with decision-support data. So what product areas do the integrator's customers care about? When times get tough, enterprises look for price-performance value, something Edgar says HDS delivers in spades.

When asked what advice he'd give Yoshida, Edgar says HDS needs more effective branding. Until then, its resellers will continue to fill in the gaps with education services.Edgar may get his wish with the big marketing push around TagmaStore. Still, it'll be interesting to see if HDS can sustain its burgeoning market lead. EMC has adopted a channel-focused scheme and has opened up development of some technologies to partners. At the same time, a newly invigorated Adaptec is moving forward with plans to purpose-build storage behind applications, a potential challenge to big iron arrays on a cost-capability basis.

Watch this space. As military philosopher Sun Tzu said, opportunities multiply as they are seized.

Jon William Toigo is a contributing editor to Storage Pipeline, CEO of storage consultancy Toigo Partners International, and founder and chairman of the Data Management Institute. Write to him at [email protected].