Storage Unpacked Podcast - Storage Unpacked 260 – Hitachi VSP One Updates with Dan McConnell

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

In this podcast episode, Chris catches up with Dan McConnell, Senior VP for Product Management at Hitachi Vantara. The company recently announced VSP One Block, a new mid-range appliance for block storage.

This is Storage Unpacked. Subscribe at StorageUnpacked.com This is Chris Evans and I'm joined by Dan McConnell from Hitachi Vantara. Still Hitachi Vantara, despite the fact that things changed last October, Dan. I think I was talking to your colleague Gary and we chatted about various different things. And we're going to have a chat today about the new stuff. But before we do that, just give people a bit of a background of yourself, what you do within the company, and we'll go from there. Absolutely. Thank you much. Dan McConnell, I run the product management organization for all things Hitachi Ventura. So our storage product

lines, block, file, and object, all the way up the stack into everything we're doing on analytics. So long story short, I run the product management side. Excellent. Okay. So lots of different products there, lots of different technologies that you're responsible for. But since the last time you spoke to Gary, and Gary obviously couldn't make it for whatever reason today, we can blame him for all sorts of things because he's not here. That's great. That's what we do anyway, even when he's here.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, perfect. But since then, you've had two really sort of major announcements. There's one in April and there's one literally just been out. Should we cover the April one first and then we can dig into the most latest one after that? Sounds great. Sounds perfect. And these are all tying in and supporting into our overarching VSP1 strategy.

So you'll see these plug into the broader platform, so to speak. But the first wave of releases was VSP1 SDS that came in two forms. One, a on-premise version and then to a cloud hosted version which is initially in Amazon so both on-premise software to find in cloud hosted software to find this is based on our s boss operating system so it carries advantages like common data services with traditional on-premise stuff. Go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, the whole SDS thing I think is quite interesting because obviously you had a product there that was very tightly connected to the

hardware years ago. And bit by bit, you know, you've modified that. You've picked out the operating system, the storage operating system, as people like to call these things. And that's very much something that can stand alone now, either in the cloud or on-premises. And I think that in itself is quite interesting because it's a sort of a demonstration of the fact that you're looking at the software as the value piece there within the product portfolio of that block platform. Absolutely. Absolutely. spot on. And we took that core and we actually made it what is true distributed shared nothing scale out. That's a lot of words, but what that means is we actually do distribute data across different nodes with parity. So it wasn't just a lift and shift of a dual controller architecture in the software we did augment it with a true scale out

capabilities okay um but kept all of the goodness that is the the data services so that it it interacts with our enterprise and mid-range products yeah so you've got things like you're you're talking about things like snapshots compression you de-dupe and all all of those replication good replication all of that good stuff that really is the sort of the value that sits above that, which is great. Now, so you said it's in Amazon today. Is that Marketplace? It is. It is. Available in Marketplace, CloudFormation templates to simplify, install. It's there today. Excellent. Okay, so that

was the SGS side. Yep. and then there was another release as well absolutely so the also in that initial release was was vsp1 file this is our next generation file product notable improvements in in performance and security and simplified management simplified management not only for the file side but also inclusive of the the VSP beneath it so it's got unified management across the file side and the box side so a huge step forward in our file product line. Okay so just to qualify, tough question here, still got FPGAs?

It does. Okay. It does. So that one's a hardware product. That's an on-premises hardware product. Absolutely. Okay. So I think what is interesting there that, you know, okay, so that's, you know, improved performance and all the rest of it.

Still FPGA driven to a certain degree. But what's interesting there is what you just touched on. And it's that idea that you've now got a uniform management piece. And when I think back to October, when there was this whole idea of VSP1, the new sort of aspiration, it was difficult to see how that would evolve in terms of replacement products, enhanced products. And clearly, the consistent management portfolio of solutions you've got now that sit above that to me is probably one of the most interesting bits there because now you're bringing in uniformity across on-premises cloud and just for a bit of background we haven't just met by accident in Las Vegas today we actually are here at an analyst event and as part of that one of the things you've been talking

about here is hybrid cloud and your desire to be a player in the hybrid cloud market. And I think this is one of those pieces that sort of gets us towards that. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. We'll call it a control plane, but a common control plane across block file and object, across on-premise and what's in the cloud, key focus area for us as we, one, generate a platform across BlockPilot and Object, but also across on-premise and off-premise. So it's multi-dimensional, so to speak. Yeah. And that's got to be important for people because if you look at the way that people manage their infrastructure today, and if you want to build in, I would say, that consumption model, to a certain degree, you need to build in I would say that consumption model to a

certain degree you need to abstract away the management and the purchasing piece into something that's more SAS based and I don't think we really touch we did touch on Everflex during this this conversation but I mean that's the sort of that's that side of it isn't it Everflex is the piece that brings that in absolutely through through Everflex we've got a flexible model all the way from, you know, if you want simplified pay-as-you-go, right, which is more of the billing side, all the way through fully managed as a service, several points in between. But we do offer all these capabilities in very flexible consumption models, CapEx, obviously, but also pay-as-you-go all the way through fully managed.

So it's interesting today. Actually, no, it was yesterday, funnily enough. I'm trying to think who was on stage. The two guys that were calling themselves the Jersey Boys. Was that Phil? Phil Vado. Yeah, so Phil reminded me of something that you've been doing for a long time that I actually had forgotten about.

I think BMW was one of your early clients for this, and this was this whole idea of managed infrastructure. And when we talk about this on demand, you know, purchasing model consumption, it made me think back, actually, that it doesn't have to be just, oh, I'm buying something and buying a lease for it for a year and buy it by the terabyte or whatever. You've got that ability to have you come in and actually say, well, we'll just run it for you. We'll run the whole lot. And I'm not sure how widespread across the industry that is,

but that's definitely something you've had for a long time. Absolutely. And to your point, I'll dance around customer names, but some very large customers, we do run their shop. So fully managed. And through some of the stuff we walked through day before yesterday, they've matured and grown that over time

to where now, you know, there's a Everflex control panel where that enables customers to do self-provisioning and metric and monitoring consumption and capacity. So it's fully managed, but customer self-service portal, all kinds of dashboards around consumption and trending. So it's definitely evolved and grown over time. Yeah, which is great.

That, for me, is an important aspect of the way that's delivered. So let's park that for a second and let's talk about the latest announcement, the third thing that we saw on that leg of the discussion about VSP1 and the portfolio, and that is block appliance. Absolutely. VSP1 block, we'll call it VSP1 block 20, our next-gen mid-range storage array. It's all Flash. Huge advancements in simplification. Huge advancements in what I'll call security improvements from password protection and security integration all the way into things that are built into the box, like our SafeSnap, which is

a immutable snapshot that is perfect for ransomware applications. You can create an instant space efficient snapshot, make it immutable for a given time period. It can't be deleted, It can't be changed even by an admin. Huge focus on simplicity, huge focus on security. And then the last one, huge focus on sustainability. All the way from, we're leading from an Energy Star certification perspective. So power utilization, leading capabilities there, but also specific features. There's a feature set in the array called Dynamic Carbon Reduction, which actually real-time monitors workload

and will proactively reduce power utilization based on your workload. Okay. Is that like powering CPU cores down and things like that? Exactly right. Exactly right. So it's real features to go drive power savings and carbon reduction. And I'll dance around at some, but in that clear site conversation I talked about before, you'll see us come out with some sustainability

dashboard capabilities that will report on carbon utilization or carbon footprint and energy utilization. So sustainability, a clear focus for us. It's interesting, isn't it? Because if you look at AI in the last 12 months, AI came in and sort of pushed everything else aside. And it's like, if you can't talk about AI, then there's something wrong. And actually, I prefer not to talk about it. So I'm not going to talk about that as part of this discussion, because I think everybody else is doing that. But sustainability is almost sort of overridden, been overridden, because people have sort of not really looked at AI and realized that actually, it's going to cause a big problem for sustainability.

And we need to really actually go back and look at that again and think, if we do start using hundreds and thousands of GPUs and more storage, we're going to have to go back and look at that technology and say, how do we make this more efficient? I think you're spot on. AI in general, much more power consumption, especially you know huge banks of of gpus huge amounts of of storage from a power utilization perspective you know it will stress the system yeah and i think the more you can do that sort of shows a what you're consuming i mean first what is what is an expression isn't there you know you first got to measure something before you can do something about it. So if you can't show on a dashboard exactly what you're using, how do you know how to reduce it?

So you've got to start somewhere. Exactly, exactly. So, okay, so three new products that were promised at some point last year and have started to emerge now. I guess this is not the end of the story in terms of what you're working towards? You guessed correctly. One might imagine if we had a software-defined release, we had a block, or we had a file release, then we had a block release. Next on the list, you might imagine an object release that rolls our object portfolio into

the overall VSB1 portfolio and platform as well. So I would expect to see that coming before too long. Okay, brilliant. Well, we'll tease everybody with that little sort of a suggestion and to see what comes with that. I'd just like, I guess, just as we sort of wrap up, just to talk about the hybrid stuff a bit more, because that to me is an interesting one. It's not a place where i would say traditionally i've seen hitachi play before and when people say hybrid what you know people think what do you mean by that but there is definitely a move towards putting storage solutions that were on premises into the public cloud for various different reasons but it worries me that there's a lift and shift mentality there, that somehow we just,

oh, we can just run our same product in there. There's a lot to it to actually make that work. Well, one, definitely a lot to it to make it work. But the way we're kind of attacking it, it's very use case driven, right? There's some use cases that are, call it backup or DR, where you're peering or replicating data out of the cloud. There's another example of a specific use case we're focused on is test dev, to where you might spin up SDS in the cloud, migrate a workload over, run your test in dev, and tear it back down. It's very use case driven, and we're working through enabling it use case by use case by use case to where you can make the hybrid cloud storyline real as opposed to just hand-waving around it. And that is the risk, I think, with a lot of that sort of stuff. So the way I look at it is if you for instance have got the ability to

migrate workloads that are vm focused so you know imagine being able to lift a vm and replicate it into the public cloud and either you connect it to vmware running in the cloud or you can maybe convert that vm to be in a you know a more native format and as you said then you can run against it in the cloud and tear it down those sort of of use cases, I think, make much more sense than just assuming that somehow there's some real benefit of running the same software but in the public cloud. There's got to be application use cases for this all the way through. You're spot on. Very much agree. Yeah, great. Okay.

So that sounds like we've got a little bit of stuff to keep our eye on, I guess, in the next few months and see what comes up. But, you know, for now, Dan, thanks for your time. It's been interesting. And what we'll do is we'll follow up and we'll get some links to the various different announcements that have been made and we'll put those in there and people can have a look. And, you know, if they've got any questions, we'll see what people come back and say. But yeah, for now, thanks, Dan. No, thank you. Greatly appreciate it. Great to catch up.