BUSINESS SYSTEMS

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Thailand views the economic downturn as the right time to empower businesses and organisations with its virtualisation and service-oriented storage strategy.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Thailand country manager Taveesak Saengthong.

The company has teamed up with its partner, Stream IT Consulting, to set up the first Storage Virtualisation Solutions Centre in Thailand, at Stream IT. The centre provides HDS solutions for virtualisation and thin provisioning for its customers and partners. It also serves as a test centre for system compatibility, in both hardware and software, for HDS and other vendor's platforms.

Taveesak Saengthong, Thailand country manager, noted that with an investment of 25 million baht, the centre was the first in Thailand offering total solutions comprising HDS hardware and software, from small to large, server and storage area network (SAN).

HDS recently opened the Business Solution Centre (BSC) and Asean headquarters with an investment of over S$10 million. According to Ravi Rajendran, HDS general manager, Asean, the new BSC incorporated the latest HDS innovations in storage infrastructure and would serve as a demonstration showcase for technology, a training facility and a certification centre for customers and partners, as well as a centre for collaborating with its partners.

With a 70% increase in available floor space and plans to increase the headcount by 50% over the next three years, the new BSC and Asean HQ cements HDS' ability to streamline its customers operations, slash operating costs and maximise returns on assets.

Citing Gartner, Rajendran said data continued to grow, by 20% to 100% a year with a significant unstructured data growth. The continued regulations and compliance for data retention, lack of mobility, low utilisation as well as economic turmoil were all regarded as IT challenges.

IDC predicted that in all areas of IT spending, storage would be the only one to see positive growth in 2009, compared to PCs, servers, networks, etc. Software and services would also continue to grow, especially in areas such as business analysis and business intelligence, and these would lead to increased demand for storage.

He said that while storage spending growth was expected to decline, the strong demand for storage capacity was not expected to change. However, customers were looking to invest in solutions that improve efficiency and ensure that whatever they improve it directly impacts their bottom line. They did not buy storage for capacity, but they buy to improve their efficiency.

As to what to expect this year, Rajendran said IT budgets would draw down with both operation expense and capital expense would come under increased scrutiny. Instead of new storage products a new architecture was required to better utilise existing assets.

There was a trend toward virtualised storage services and maximising return on overall assets.

"What was happening," Rajendran said, "was that a lot of customers today were looking toward service-orientation, and Hitachi has approached the market with a service-oriented storage strategy three years ago, so that customers would be able to maximise returns on overall assets, by simplifying the environment, not just new investments.

"As a platform, customers can add in different times of services based on different business needs of service levels to the users. It is integration, rather than point solutions, one for SAN, one for NAS, one for VTL or backup, one for archiving, but they want these to be more integrated."

He also noted that the banking, telco and government sectors were among the very early adopters of virtulisation technology, and they were the major focus for HDS across the region.

Channel partners were very key part for HDS. The right technology must be with the right channel partners, he said. As the vendor, its our job to do knowledge transfer. So we need to choose the right partner first, he said.

Now Hitachi focuses on being a strategy partner to its customers.

With coming out with certain strategy for downturn scenario, as the company called Downturns Winning solutions. Those include tiered storage and virtualisation, dynamic provisioning, active archiving and data de-duplication.

Virtualisation is an enabler and is proven technology. Rajendran said that some of largest banks had implemented Hitachis Dynamic Provisioning and could claim back 30 to 40% of the storage, thats mean they could take care of new business without asking for more budget.

A large banking institute here, implemented consolidation, virtualisation and disaster recovery, all HDS technology, covering everything from mainframe to an open systems environment.

"They shared with us that after deploying HDS technology, They derived savings of about 50 million baht over five years, that's a lot of savings, a fantastic reference, and now it's almost at a final stage," the general manager said, but wouldn't disclose the name of the bank.