Virtual differences
That differentiation in the development paths of storage suppliers has also had an effect on progress in virtualisation. On the server side, the emergence of VMware and others has seen virtualisation change the way datacentres operate. So far, storage virtualisation has advanced at a slower clip, however, despite the obvious attractions of pooling and better utilising multiple systems.
"We had [companies like] FalconStor and Network Appliance do virtualisation in the network but to do that they had to remap the storage and couldn't enhance the performance," Yoshida says. "In most cases they degraded the processing of the storage. [Virtualisation and interoperability are] easier to do on the server because you're not worrying about persistence. Server processing is like water. You move it and it's gone.
You've got higher-density blades and you couldn't put them all in a rack because of power and they were 10 per cent utilised so you put three, or four or five servers onto one VMware server. In the storage world, it's more difficult because you have to move the data as well."
Despite most users having to rely on their storage hardware supplier, Yoshida contends that storage virtualisation is already quite well advanced, aided by developments in deployment such as 'thin provisioning' -- the ability to save admin time by automating the availability of storage through shared pools.
"We believe [storage virtualisation] is already mainstream for large customers," he says. "The biggest waste is in the non-used space and the last job was to crack that open. And we've done that through thin-provisioning, also known as Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning."
HDS's aim is to provide the back-end server that is the ultimate data repository for customers, and it contends that it is already fulfilling that ambition. Firms can't just keep on adding data volumes, Yoshida argues, and they will need to switch attention from virtualisation on the server to virtualisation on the desktop.
"They have no choice. The volumes are so large that they have to consolidate. The next big wave is virtualising the desktop with one gold image [on the server]. That's going to give more consolidation."
Many businesses today are moving away from having applications installed locally and towards a model where they are delivered over the web as a service. In the late 1990s, storage service providers emerged to do the same thing for storage. Could the model be successful this time around even though it appeared to die a death back then? Maybe, Yoshida believes.
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