IT Week: The capacity of hardware and demand for storage are growing exponentially. As chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems can you explain the implications for IT managers?

Hubert Yoshida: In 1999 the maximum storage was about 16TB, and the average per [storage device] controller was less than 1TB. The Hitachi maximum is currently 146TB with an average of 18TB per controller. By 2009 it will be multiple petabytes per controller, with an average of 100TB. There are important implications from this for connections, the bandwidth to support it, and management. It all needs to scale up.

What are the trends in storage technology?

The biggest thing is consolidation, and the advent of the storage area network [SAN]. Most of the systems we were competing with were sold in the 1999 timeframe. Their connectivity was [limited to] three to five controllers but much more is now needed. Controllers are the biggest cost and software is licensed by control unit.

What are the main elements of your future storage strategy?

We are looking at where to put the intelligence - in the switch or storage unit. There are different types of intelligence. For routing, intelligence in the switch is best, but for things like data moving, it is better residing close to the data in the controller units on the edge of the network. The network does not know where it resides. If this is in the controller unit all the data is available - with links to other controllers where needed.

How are you developing your technology?

HDS is working closely with AppIQ on SAN management to visualise a whole enterprise [for storage]. We are getting into the utility storage environment, whereby storage is provided on demand. Storage service providers [previously] failed in this because companies each wanted a separate server and they didn't have virtual private arrays to handle this. The other piece is financial - someone has to carry the expense. We're going to see more and more data. In Japan there's a virtual Lightning system being piloted with two Fibre Channel boards with a NAS [network-attached storage] front-end, and a Fibre Channel back-end in the control unit. This is not competing with Cisco, Brocade and so on. We partner. It is very complementary.

How have new corporate regulations affected storage requirements?

There are specific requirements for indexing and archiving, such as the US Securities and Exchange Commission's requirement that some data cannot be modified or erased. Then there is support for the legal discovery process. This may mean "pausing the clock" on some data [freezing it] then hiding some named data elements which must not be reset and after 30 days moving it to another tier. This frees up expensive [first tier] data space which you should reuse. HDS's common [storage] pool approach allows [data space] reuse, snapshot backup, tuning, and working on logical devices.

ABOUT HUBERT YOSHIDA

Hubert Yoshida is vice president and chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

He is responsible for defining the technical direction of the company and has spearheaded the Hitachi TrueNorth sales initiative.