Claus Mikkelsen

I just returned from Cleveland and had the honor of presenting the HDS recent announcement of the Hitachi Unified Storage to customers of the CHI Corporation and hosted by the esteemed Greg @Knieriemen, and enjoyed presenting our new product for the first time.

On the flight to Cleveland I was reading some old magazines that had been accumulating on my coffee table and came across this cartoon from The New Yorker and thought it was appropriate for this post.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2011/11/21/cartoons_20111114#slide=7

The caption may be a bit hard to read, but it says “It was much nicer before people started storing their personal information in the cloud”. And although intended for humor, this is a classic example of the “concept” being misunderstood.

I have my own favorite story on “not clear on the concept”. When I returned from the military and rejoined IBM in 1970, I was greeted with technology that was job changing: IBM had implemented what was called the SUN Network, tying major IBM locations together electronically. An intranet, essentially. Shortly thereafter email was emerging as a new form of communication within the company.

I was completing a project with a colleague and after our final meeting asked him to document our agreement and send a note to me copying his manager and my manager. The next day I received 3 identical emails, which was a bit confusing, but 10 minutes later I received a phone call from him apologizing that he had sent me all 3 copies and asked me to return 2 of them so he could send them to his manager and mine. Not clear on the concept? Doh!

I will swear to the ends of the earth, that this is a true story. I’m not smart enough to make this stuff up.

What does this have to do with unified storage and HUS? Plenty, actually. Unified storage is the latest challenge in the industry and all the vendors are tripping over themselves bringing products to market. But what is the “concept” of unified storage? Is it packaging GigE, FC and iSCSI in a box and shipping it? I don’t think so. Unified storage is not packaging, it’s engineering and integration, which is what we’ve done.

For example, with HUS there are no static partitions of file storage and block storage, and capacity can be nondisruptively reassigned. Also, with the Hitachi Command Suite all of this storage, as well as any other storage in your data center, can be managed with one product, not separate products depending on the last storage acquisition your company has made.

The “concept” with unified storage can be summed up in a single word: UNIFIED! Not just another box that has packaged multiple protocols. There is a vast difference, and we were willing to invest the engineering effort to make it right. What a “concept”.

So, as many of you know, we at HDS have been talking a lot of late about capacity efficiency. I’ve blogged about it, Hu has put in his views on it, as has David Merrill, who owns all things “economics” for us.

David and I both work for Hu, and the running joke at HDS is that we’ve actually never been in the same place at the same time due to our collective travel schedules. Seriously, getting any two of us together at the same time is rare; getting all three of us together? Well, that almost never happens.

But it did last August. One of the members of our Executive Committee was so stunned to see the three of us in the same building that he felt compelled to capture that rare “Kodak Moment”. That’s me on the left (the scruffy “Dos Equis man” beard is now gone), David is in the middle, and, of course, Hu on the right.

Well, it happened again a few weeks ago, and someone had the great idea of capturing the three of us on video talking about capacity efficiency. Well, almost.

Hu was tied up with customers, so David and I launched into this cool discussion on “CapEff”, and the economics supporting our positioning. It’s not a long video, so I hope you have time to watch it, and I totally apologize for that bad haircut of mine. David is more GQ in the video, by far.

One of the many things I love about the video is that this was completely unrehearsed, and there was no “David, you give this message, and Claus, you give that”. We were very much in sync on the topic from the beginning.

So take a gander, and give us your thoughts. As for our competitors, you might want to watch it as well, since it will drive future sales. I love the message, and the impromptu nature of the video. It was just fun to do.

Except for the stupid haircut, that is.

Don’t miss the opportunity to win a free capacity efficiency assessment from an HDS economic expert: http://www.hds.com/ppc/capacity-efficiency-economize-storage/

For other posts on maximizing storage and capacity efficiencies, check these out: http://blogs.hds.com/capacity-efficiency.php

I’ve been spending a lot of time on mainframe activities over the past 6 months or so, which is totally fine with me. This year alone I’ve visited 8 very large customers wanting to improve efficiencies. What seems to be getting the most traction are a few very unique products of ours, namely Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT).

I’ve blogged about these products on numerous occasions, as has Hu Yoshida and David Merrill, but the latest news here is that HDP now works on z/OS (and soon HDT will as well). The response from the customers I’ve been with, just in the past few weeks, has been extremely positive. Everyone wants to save money, improve storage performance, and reduce OPEX, whether open systems or z/OS. I’ve blogged on the notion of the Storage Computer, and this now applies to the “big iron” guys as well.

We are the only vendor to have these features available on the z/OS platform. EMC does not have it, but even more surprisingly, neither does IBM—and they own the platform!

To those of you that have read this far and assume that the MF platform is going away: think again. I came across this article from Forbes entitled Mainframes are for Kids that strongly indicates otherwise. New “mainframers” are being trained as we speak. How cool is that!

The truth is that z/OS pretty much runs itself and has solved many of the issues we’ve struggled with in open systems, so it tends not to get a lot of focus. So this new news, is big news.

Basically, VSP allows our z/OS customers to deploy much cheaper storage. Previously, there were only 3 storage options available, namely from IBM, EMC, and HDS, since they were the only platforms supporting FICON. Now, with VSP our customers have a much larger (and much less expensive) choice in storage.

HDP, through our unique data dispersion architecture, provides a significant improvement in performance, especially for cache-unfriendly workloads. DB2 performance improvements anyone? You’ll love it!!

And finally, HDT automates the placement of data on the most appropriate tier. I recently wrote in a post that roughly 80% of data residing on tier 1 disk, doesn’t need to be there. HDT will dramatically and automatically reduce capacity costs, and the power and cooling improvements that go along with it. All in support of our capacity efficiency efforts.

So there you have it. I’ve always wondered how many mainframers read blogs, so if you know one, please forward this around. I’ll be doing more z/OS blogs in the future, and if you are a big iron person (or anyone else for that matter), feel free to leave a comment.

I want to know if you’re out there!!

For other posts on maximizing storage and capacity efficiencies, check these out: http://blogs.hds.com/capacity-efficiency.php