Bangkok Post : HDS adopts agile cloud strategy

DATA STORAGE

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Thailand addressed Agile cloud storage, Managed services, Dynamic tiering and Dynamic provisioning are its key to tapping the growth of virtualisation this year.

Watcharasit Santisuknirun

According to Ravi Rajendran, HDS vice president and general manager, Asean, Thailand is one of HDS's fastest growth markets in Asean and so far the performance of HDS Thailand has been on track.

Citing IDC, Rajendran stated that the unstructured data content is the fastest growth data, or around 120 percent year by year due to the digitisation. Those unstructured data content cover web-based social networking, media like broadcasting, and surveillance security systems such as CCTV.

The crisis has lead people back to do their stock checking, however, the data and storage keeps growing and this is the scenario that HDS's customers have met. "Our job is how to help customer drive costs down by the storage utilisation. We help doing assessment, implement virtualisation," he said, noting that big thing for HDS is the storage virtualisation.

HDS has agile cloud strategy, the unique approach that virtualises all existing storage resources into a single, agile service oriented infrastructure that reduces storage costs, and so far the company has worked with cloud service providers.

With dynamic thin provisioning, HDS solution helps customers to eliminate the waste of allocated unused space, reduce the cost of moving and copying fat volumes by eliminating unused space, and reduce the provisioning of storage from hours to minutes.

Dynamic tiering is another key strategy which Rajendran claims is the unique differentiation of HDS. It eliminates the enormous staff overhead associated with moving and copying data, minimises the cost of expensive disk drives, leverages lower cost storage for inactive data and copies, and optimises the use of high performance storage.

HDS has approached the dynamic tiering to telecom operators, he said. Combining tiered storage management with storage virtualisation and dynamic thin provisioning will offer the greatest reduction in capital and operational costs.

"Today HDS by far the number one storage virtualisation with has 15,000 virtual storage controllers in the globe," the vice president said.

According to Watcharasit Santisuknirun, the new HDS Thailand country manager, the company would focus more on customers' storage utilisation and help them to reclaim the unused storage capacity by virtualisation.

HDS this year will also more focus on pre-sales and post-sales resources and will increase the number of partner channels soon.

Currently HDS has two distributors, nForce and Acer Computer and Stream IT the gold partner, as well as Sun Microsystems who take care of the high-end market. The country manager said the company is planning to recruit more partners to take care of the mid-range market.

Government, banking, education and manufacturing are the key potential segments for HDS by this year, Watcharasit said, adding that there are more government projects in the pipeline and the growth of web-based technology that boost courseware and e-learning will also lead to higher requirement of storage.

Watcharasit added that the present economic condition has caused difficulty in spending, thus whatever investment must be justified. HDS's strategy is to prove customers with "economised" investment. Government is still the potential growth sector, he said, noting that the company aims to grow at the rate higher than the overall market.