Tom Zack, vice president, product marketing, Asia Pacific - International Americas for Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) talks to Prashant L Rao about HDS’s switched architecture, business in Asia, future developments and its recently formed relationship with NetApps

You are traditionally seen as a Storage Area Network (SAN) vendor. Is this perception accurate?
We started selling SAN solutions four years ago. Asia has been a bright spot with SAN growing very fast. Recently, we announced a relationship with NetApp. Hitachi will sell a jointly branded gateway product with NetApp’s Network Attached Storage (NAS) head that will talk to HDS’ SAN or Direct Attached Storage (DAS). We are going to sell NetApp’s product and this relationship differs from other alliances like HP and Sun, where they sell our equipment. With this alliance, we believe that we have a good chance of taking a crack at the EMC Celerra family of NAS products. In the next couple of months, we will be announcing a NAS solution that is in beta right now. This will be a NAS server capable of being directly plugged into a SAN. It will be able to handle SAN, NAS, DAS and mainframe.

How does your architecture differ from that of your competitors?
We have an extremely scalable platform, which has helped us go from 10 percent of the enterprise storage market to 45 percent. In an HDS solution, all the disks at the back-end talk to all the disks at the front-end, it is a switched architecture. Our competitors use bus technology and there you see computing going up as you scale up. You add a single subsystem and a bus solution looks like a wrecking yard. Our equipment can scale up to 50-60 TB in a single subsystem.

Firmware can be upgraded on the fly, customers don’t like it when you tell them you want to bring hundreds of servers down for four hours. HSBC in Hong Kong has to keep its ATMs running 24x7x365. If an ATM is down for 15 minutes on Sunday it’s in the newspapers.

We are the only manufacturer to make our own products, including the disks, arrays and the software. IBM could claim that before they sold their disk business to us.

You have always been strong in the enterprise space. Of late there’s been more focus on the mid-range segment. What’s your strategy there?
At the high-end, HDS is the No 1 player in the enterprise space. There is no leader in the modular space. I don’t think that anybody will make money in the low-end. We offer very high-performance shared access with our clustered file system. It’s a boutique offering—unlike other solutions that only work with servers from a particular vendor, HDS lets you use servers from multiple vendors. In SAN we support Brocade, Nishan and InData and we are going to do the same in NAS. We launched the 9500V, a mid-size box that scales from 500 GB to 30 TB.

Typically, you would see it shipping in 5 to 10 TB configurations. This product brings high-performance and availability to the NAS segment, launched in December 2002.

The Lightning 9900V is the size of a large refrigerator. Logical volumes are grouped into a host storage domain. HP, Sun and NT servers can be hooked up to a host storage domain till it is 80 percent utilised and then you move on to the next port. The Thunder 9500V offers the same facility in a modular architecture. Features like ‘point-in-time’ copy and backup are the same across the 9900V and 9500V. The same scripts and GUI apply.

Today the storage market is split into consolidated storage in data centres and distributed workgroup storage. So you have big monolithic arrays at one end and rack mount storage at the other. The same customers are buying both.

Could you elaborate why Asia has been a bright spot for HDS’s SAN solutions?
In South Asia we have had phenomenal success in the telecommunications market. Our customers include most large telecoms in South Asia, Singapore and Malaysia. In North Asia, we have enjoyed the same kind of success in banking. Standard Chartered, Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China—these are just some of our wins. Batch processing, ATM transactions, trade finance, securities dealer desk are some of the applications that make use of our SANs. We are selling high-end machines in Mongolia and Tibet. India and China are showing explosive growth for us. Asia and Eastern Europe are the fast growing regions.

Looking at the future, where do you see storage networking in a couple of years?
Capacity will keep growing—rich media applications have a phenomenal appetite for capacity. It is tougher for IT managers as old tools are not keeping up. Our SANs let smaller teams manage higher volumes. One of our customers in Asia with 1,000 servers had just four administrators. Without a SAN they would have needed 50.

We’re also releasing a 146 GB disk drive. We expect to see a shift from NAS filers to NAS gateways. iSCSI is starting to take off. Our goal is to have one big array that does everything—SAN, NAS, iSCSI, DAS and scales up to 150 TB.