Could you talk about Virtualization 2.0 and Hitachi’s role in enabling it?

Clearly virtualization is a tool that brings ease of management. With the IT having to mange an ever increasing amt of data, clearly you need to have ease of management, reporting and provisioning. As we need more and more access to information we need an easy way to provide a medium to store the information. This is the key. Management is what is required. Currently there is a disconnect between what business needs - which is how can I reach more customers, and the ability of the IT infrastructure to deliver. So virtualisation becomes a tool to gain agility. IT budgets are not increasing and living within the means of these budgets is challenging. CIOs need to be lean and do more with less, but we have a running joke at Hitachi, of whether one should do more with less until you do everything with nothing. But jokes apart, this is the current landscape within enterprises today.

What are some of the challenges enterprises are facing in adopting storage virtualization?

Clearly the challenge is to gain confidence in the technology. Nobody even knew what VMWare was ten years ago. I didn’t even know where they were based. Confidence in the technology started to come when they became a part of EMC and started to have successes of their own through some large early adopters. These early adopters can afford to have an additional platform to play with. I found that the users here are still the ones who cant afford to experiment. They are looking for ways to have references so as to start virtualising.

The adoption curve is bound to be slow as compared to the rest of the world. The curve here startes 2 to 3 years later. However, this is something that everyone will have to tale to because you cant afford to waste resources. You cannot have underutilised resources today. It’s important that we understand that the tools are there, the infrastructure is real and it works. People can now believe that they can now adopt these things with confidence

Could detail out the new technology you’’re introducing as part of the virtualization 2.0 roadmap?

Today we are looking at bringing in the concept of merging high end infrastructure with affordable and flexible form factors. We want to give the same tools to every single enterprise in spite of size and budget. We want to enable enterprises by giving them the ability to implement an architecture that can take them along their growth path. We want to give them tools to deal with their growth. Enterprises in India are in a high growth phase. Growing business volumes and transaction sizes require that enterprises scale dynamically without taxing the infrastructure. What we are delivering very shortly is the ability to dynamically migrate data from one platform to another. As platforms become less useful enterprises may need to go to the next step. You need to be able to create the links that will help enterprises transition from one technology to the next. This is the kind of value we are looking to create for our customers.

Today we are used to large capacity provisional disk drives. Its no news that SSDs are becoming more relevant but they don’t solve the problem. If you do not have enough bandwidth in the system then you cannot take the advantage. Also you have to put technology close to the applications.

What are some of the storage trends you are seeing with respect to Indian enterprises?

There is a major need to be able to retrieve information independently of the application. You may be in one country and you happen to be traveling to another one, you need access to information, There must be a way to disjoint information from the application that created it and make it available to another one.

Let me take an example. India is going through UID. Part of this initiative is to create information that you will need to last the test of time. The children of your children may need access to this information. So the question is how do we create that information and retrieve it through the cycle of time. Its really about finding ways to disconnect them from the medium The more information we create the more the need to search and retrieve that information in the most efficient manner possible.

Could you share some best practices that can help our readers achieve storage excellence?

Clearly its hard to speak generally. The first thing that any CIO needs to do is understand their problem and their needs. These are key. Storage is at the end of the link in the IT process and forms the backbone. Clearly you cannot start from there but technology is something you will need. Data needs to be stored efficiently in a way that can be utilized even decades after its creation. The main idea is to be able to create legacy that can be utilized. This dictates that storage infrastructure needs to be robust and efficient.