Too often, firms rely on the ongoing decline of price-per-megabyte to bail them out, Yoshida says. "Many companies still bet on capex, which is absolutely wrong. They solve their problems by adding capacity. Budget in reality is going down today so buyers are very receptive regarding a storage economics decision."
SOS is the message
HDS is also playing to a broad management audience with its plans to make storage architectures more adaptive and flexible through software such as virtualisation programs and de-duplication tools. Yoshida calls this 'service-oriented storage', a play on service-oriented architecture, or SOA, the fashionable approach to server software that sees monolithic code being broken down into manageable components with associated metadata so that organisations are better able to replicate, change and instantiate processes.
"It's very similar to SOA in the server space where you have an XML layer and move apps and share modules like a billing module so the IT organisation can align more closely with the organisation as a whole," Yoshida says.
"That's happened with VMware on servers and everything is dynamic. When the business comes and says 'I want to run a campaign' and IT says 'You'll have it in three months', that doesn't work because a marketing campaign is very time-sensitive. [By doing something similar to SOA for storage] we can become more agile and business-oriented. A service approach needs to be quantified in language the business understands."
But some would argue that the underlying problem with storage is that it hasn't followed the desktop/server road to standardisation, with too many vendors developing proprietary hardware, software and firmware. Surely the industry should have endorsed 'the Dell effect' and storage should have become commoditised in the same way as PCs?
Yoshida insists that in storage fundamental differentiation has been necessary because of underlying complexity that makes it hard to build in support for the Nirvana of interoperability.
"You have to have that intelligence," he says. "The real problem [for seekers of interoperability] is there's a real difference in storage. It's not 'storage is storage is storage'. There is no platform for storage."
Yoshida suggests that if there is to be uniformity of approach it is likely to come from one vendor emerging as the dominant force -- and naturally he wants that vendor to be HDS. Sun and HP already resell HDS kit to their customers, he points out.
"They're all uniquely different [in their approaches to technology] but Sun and HP [sell HDS hardware]... maybe IBM [one day] will use my technology."
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