Today i was in one event where Hu Yoshida, Vice President and CTO (Hitachi Data Systems Corporation) was doing a presentation about Hitachi storage products. It’s always good to listen from a well known storage specialist. That said…
The focus of the presentation was the USP (Universal Storage Platform), virtualization of the storage resources. My main concern in storage these days is about scale-out (and that is why i’m looking at the Isilon solutions), and get out of the redundancy “inside” the storage. Well, besides the speaker did talk about scale-out as one focus, the idea was scale-up, centralized, SAN solution.
Many would say that USP can scale-out, and is not about centralized (single-point-of-failure), but is far away from a solution i would be happy with. I did ask him about it, and he did say the focus is scale-out and up. Be different from the rest of the market. Well…
Who in these days are creating a SAN solution for internet services with PB of data?
We have many researchs in SAN protocols like iSCSI, FCoE (actually in the presentation he did make a comparison between FC and FCoE). I agree that file access protocols like NFS, CIFS are not the *one-fits-all* solution for data access, but the costs of a SAN/FC solution is to high. So we have alternatives for that with block based protocols using ethernet…
Performance? I think is a matter of design, and in the end performance is a composition (+1 for scale-out ;-). You can create a solution with any size of recipient, and availability and cost is what matter most in my opinion (if we will use a general rule).
So, would be nice if Oracle look at all this and realize that the unified storage model, with features built-in (ZFS rules!): snapshots, deduplication, compression, checksum, RAID, iSCSI, FC, NFS, CIFS, replication (send/receive), hybrid storage model, etc, etc, etc… is the (dx) in the storage world right now. But 7000 series needs some love… we need HSM and scale-out! Clustered ZFS would be great! And interoperability between other ZFS servers would be nice too.
There are Hitachi clients out there?
Would be nice to know what you guys think about it.
Hitachi clients or not… ;-)

peace