What's more interesting to you - Hitachi's TVs or their clustered storage?

Barry Whyte from IBM probably wishes he could re-write his blog post for today that anticipated something big from HDS, because HDS underwhelmed the storage world with it's announcement of storage pork - otherwise known as HAM (High Availability Manager).

I think Hitachi was trying to figure out how to get some buzz going without buying a hot startup, hiring an expensive exec from a competitor, laying people off or cutting everybody's salaries. Nobody ever accused Hitachi of marketing originality, but trying to create blog buzz for software that eliminates a single point of failure from enterprise products might place them in the top percentile for marketing ineptness. 

People were expecting a lot more and maybe sometime there will be more - about Hitachi clustered storage.  3PAR has had it since day one - and we celebrated our 10 year anniversary this month.  I know that Hitachi would love to change the world, with their cluster attempt, but they are 10 years after, after all.

This clustered storage stuff is hard.  Its easy to talk about, but much more difficult to deliver.  That's why 3PAR's track record of delivering clustered storage arrays means something. 

Otherwise Hitachi announced new big screen TV products today, something that might be interesting to blog readers. While their USP storage arrays tends to be expensive, their new Alpha line of LCD TV's look like they might be competitively priced.

Comments

[nate]

That's too bad.. I was going to email the hitachi team that underwhelmed us with the AMS2500 to congratulate them and welcome them to the 21st century, but I guess I'll have to save that email for another day.

Hey Marc have you taken a look at the high end Fujitsu stuff? I'm surprised that it doesn't seem to ever get mentioned, on paper at least it seems extremely robust, up to 8 clustered mesh controllers, up to 2700 disks/2.7PB, round robin cache mirroring in the event a controller goes down the cache remains mirrored, lots of connectivity and stuff, and half a T of cache.

I don't see block based virtualization or some of the other fancy things that come with your boxes, but still I was quite surprised to see that they had what they had and it doesn't appear to be OEM'd -
http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/STRSYS/system/eternus8000_brochure.pdf (7MB)

I shot a link to it over to my 3PAR SE and he said that they don't encounter Fujitsu much at all in the U.S., I've certainly never heard their named mentioned in the past several years in terms of storage.

[marc farley]

The storage system business is extremely difficult and competitive and I think it is very difficult for Japanese system and storage vendors to figure out how to succeed in the US.

[Michael Hay]

With all respect, what we've got in our portfolio now is what customers are asking for, so there is truth within what we are talking about. Hitachi at the core is about solving real customer problems and not fancy marketing which when the onion is peeled back there is nothing but mostly thin air. EMC is just the opposite; they like a showy fancy release that leads to not a lot of substance in the end. Ask EMC what has happened to Invista, Widesky, Infoscape, Centera, ILM V2.0, etc.

BTW - making nuclear power plants is really hard too, in fact harder than the storage business. Let's not forget we are dealing with Hitachi here which has a far broader reach.

Michael (http://blogs.hds.com/michael)