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Controller-level storage virtualisation to boost storage utilisation levels

At the turn of the century it looked like storage vendor Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was about to turn the market on its head and unseat industry leaders

EMC and IBM. Recently, however, that challenge petered out, leaving HDS potentially as an also-ran. But now the company believes its approach to storage virtualisation is helping it again steal a march on those rivals.

The extent of HDS’s challenge can be seen in some recent industry analyst reports. One of these, from IDC, highlights HDS’s ongoing battle with hardware titan Dell in the area of external disk storage systems. That battle is for the fourth spot in worldwide sales and, with a market share of just 8.1% in the third quarter of 2007, visions of HDS’s market leadership look a long way off.

Gartner paints a similar picture: its measurement of worldwide external controller-based disk storage vendor revenues gives HDS a share of 9.7%. That is patently a touchy subject for HDS’s chief operating officer, Jack Domme.

“The industry analysts don’t really see the whole picture,” he states. By this he means they do not include HDS’s sales of high-end disk arrays through its partnerships with Sun Microsystems or the separate deal for the supply of high-end storage technology that Hitachi has with Hewlett-Packard. The financial analysts get this and are far more positive about HDS’s market share, insists Domme, although he claims to be ambivalent about chasing ratings. His primary concern is delivering products that customers want.

Domme suggests that, for the quarter ending December 2007, HDS’s sales of high-end systems, services and software grew “in the high teens”.

Financial analyst Caris & Company supports Domme’s claim that HDS has momentum in this segment. In a November 2007 report on its previous quarter, Caris analyst Shebly Seyrafi noted that HDS had 7,300 customers for its high-end Universal Storage Platform (USP), with numbers rising fast.

With HDS’s USP V the centrepiece of its storage virtualisation offerings, that sales impetus helps the company differentiate itself from rivals. “Our decision to do [storage] virtualisation at the controller level rather than at the switch level is helping us deliver the real benefits of virtualisation today,” says Domme. Those benefits include the ability to move data across a heterogeneous pool of storage and drive up the hitherto “dismally low” storage allocation rates, he adds.

But while HDS takes a different approach to storage virtualisation to EMC and IBM, Domme’s claims for victory in this market may be premature. Another storage industry analyst, the Enterprise Strategy Group, credits HDS with roughly 6,000 customers for its USP; IBM, it estimates, has 10,000 for the equivalent solution. Those figures may need updating to account for some fast growth by HDS but, even so, it still has plenty of ground to make up.

HDS’s high-end sales may be healthy, but its parent company, Hitachi, is markedly cooler on overall storage revenues. For its quarter ending 31 December 2007, Hitachi’s revenues associated with storage were ¥95 billion ($932 million), up just 2% on the period a year ago. Nonetheless, the sheer weight of its parent and its loyal customer base makes HDS a competitor that the two giants of storage ignore at their own risk.

Further reading

Storage pressures Storage priorities are changing: on top of the constant requirement for ever more capacity, there is intense pressure for greater efficiency

Dell buys for the future Dell acquires a storage vendor and a SaaS desktop management provider to recapture its former glory

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