Hitachi eyes infrastructure for the cloud

gallery

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) wants to focus on providing the infrastructure for cloud computing services, rather than becoming a service provider itself.

This is according to Hubert Yoshida, vice president and chief technology officer of Hitachi, who made the comments during an interview with IT PRO at Storage Expo.

“I have learned to say never say never but I believe in core competency," he said. "We can provide the infrastructure and we want to be the best at that but we can partner with other people who have more confidence in the cloud to provide it.”

Instead, Hitachi is focusing on “creating storage sustainability”.

“If you look at the stack of copies, unstructured data and content, not all of this needs to be on the primary storage,” said Yoshida.

“Our solution aims to reduce costs... by putting data into one common repository,” he added.

The simplest way to do this is through virtualisation, but Yoshida was disappointed with the slow pace of adopting the technology.

“Take up of virtualisation is not as fast as it should be,” he said. “Fifty per cent of our [devices] are virtualised and there has been a better uptake over the past year due to the economic downturn, but it is a change and people are reluctant.”

“The technology is there but it is no good if it is not implemented,” he added.

Click here for more news from Storage Expo 2009.

Email to a friend

Print this page