"The reason it died a death is that the whole idea of a service provider is to leverage your resource across [many] consumers but people wanted their own [private environment] and [the storage service providers] didn't have the management software," Yoshida says, predicting that the model will make some kind of return, perhaps led by large "data depots" or cloud-based data-centres, even though "for the enterprise there are still concerns about privacy and audit trails".
"The private enterprises will continue [to store inside their own firewalls] but the data depots will have more leverage and cost of sale will be lower," he predicts.
As for HDS's role, Yoshida says that accepted wisdom about storage architectures might need tweaking if the world moves to the concept of the cloud, which will require huge datacentre resources and -capacities that make even today's enormous storage vaults seem paltry by comparison. But HDS's focus will remain on storage, he says, rather than reaching out to be a player- in servers like rivals IBM, HP or Sun.
"It may require some change but that would be good because the rest of the world catches up," Yoshida says. "We're the only vertically-oriented storage company left and we don't intend to stray from that. The next big market is in the storage archive [where HDS built momentum last year by acquiring Archivas]."
Yoshida sees no let-up in stimuli for storage. "Unstructured data is growing faster with email coming over the internet," he says. "There are sensors for oil exploration, and an Airbus [plane] has over a terabyte of data."
But he does see greater adoption of smarter systems to help firms cut back on wasteful storage processes.
The watchwords for Yoshida are "consolidation, utilisation, elimination" and he sees de-duped bitstreams and attachments and other ways to separate the wheat from the chaff and get rid of "stale data".
Another push for HDS is assisting in the development of green datacentres. This will involve addressing the electrical requirements and heat emissions of all elements of server-room infrastructure but will also serve ultimately to save on costs and help CIOs befriend their peers in -facilities management, Yoshida argues.
However, relying on core component suppliers getting their respective houses in order will not be enough.
Datacentre designers will also have to address how best to make use of waste heat, sustainable power sources like solar power and other construction conundrums.
As for storage media, he is unconvinced by the claims of solid-state Flash-based memory to act as a replacement for server- disk and tape although some firms are proffering it as an ultra-fast alternative.
"Flash disk drives cost 20 or 30 times more than disk and we can do a lot of the same things with spinning media, for example through wide-striping [spreading data over many disks]. There is some demand for Flash storage in handling -financial information but a lot can be done much faster in server memory."
Wide-striping and other technologies like HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should help the business keep on its current rate of progress "for the next 20 years", he reckons. With demand for data storage so intense right now, that could be just as well.
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