We recently discovered that Hu Yoshida, Vice President and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has a blog. This may not seem to be a big deal to many people but it is actually a very major change on several different levels by one of the top players in a traditionally secretive industry.

The storage industry has been built entirely on a foundation of proprietary technologies until quite recently. There are very few companies operating in this space at the top end; HP, EMC, IBM and HDS. These companies have spent many years in a constant leap-frog with each other in terms of high-end system performance. The mantra was always hardware performance, hardware performance. Bit by bit this has started to change.

With increased scale comes increased management complexity. One guy with a CLI and a batch file cannot manage 100 storage arrays. EMC in particular realised several years ago that software could be a big differentiator in addition to IO/sec. They now own the top-end of the SRM space. Everyone else has been playing catch-up. To our mind, the reliance by many of the other top vendors on third party SRM tools is deeply flawed. If you are all selling similar hardware with the same software, what is your USP?

The SMI initiatives have been well intentioned and all storage companies at least pay lip service to the concept of interoperability. Indeed, AppIQ built its entire SRM tool around open standards. However, it is still impossible to do end-to-end provisioning of one vendors storage by another vendors tool-set. With the recent purchase of AppIQ by HP, this is probably going to remain the case for the foreseeable future. It is clear that Mr Hurd understands how critical software is going to be in re-building HP’s storage business.

The reason we mention all of the above is that Mr Yoshida’s Blog is mainly about software. This is interesting for several reasons. HDS seem to have had a reputation in the past as a “hardware only” company where the OEM business was as important (or even more important) than their own sales - they had left the software leadership to others.

In a previous existance, we spent many years providing software services to Toshiba in Europe, USA and Japan. They were a fantastic customer and we worked very well together. It was very clear to us that Toshiba saw all of the value residing in the hardware of the products that we worked on for them. We don’t believe this was unique to them, it appears that many Japanese companies, even today, have a blind spot when it comes to software. We saw that the software was going to make or break the system they were developing. In the end the products were not a success in the market and the belated focus on software played a big part in this.

Looking at HDS, it appears they have learned the hard lessons of their Japanese peers and are now putting a big push on the software side. Like most of the players, they seem to be betting on storage virtualisation as the “next big thing”. In this area, more than any other previously, software will be the critical success factor.

A blog about software - not exactly earth shattering. But a blog in a secretive industry, about software, by the CTO of a traditionally closed Japanese-owned company; this is big news. We hope this is the start of a sea-change in the industry and we start seeing blogs by Ann Livermore/Bob Schultz in HP or Jeffrey Nick/Howard Elias in EMC. Jonathan Schwartz in SUN has shown that it can be done in such a way that you are not revealing your company secrets but you are showing some of the internal thinking of a company and bypassing corporate PR drones with their constant happy-clappy “all is fabulous” message.

Whilst it is very interesting to see such a big focus on software, it is also worth noting the moves being made on the services side. IBM has always understood the importance of the services business and recent moves by EMC show that they too see the potential value-add. The use of key partners by the big players is a critical part of them being able to offer a wide and deep service. The recent announcement by HDS of a partnership with Glasshouse shows that they also buy into this model. Their own service offerings look quite rich and Glasshouse will obviously be able to add to this in a big way.

Mr Yoshida clearly understands the importance of addressing your markets by whatever means possible. It is well worth reading his post and comments on The Value of Blogging and Where should Intelligence Reside. We’ll be reading his blog eagerly. As Robert Scoble says: Subscribed!

UPDATE: Literally an hour after this was posted we found out about Dave Hitz’s Blog. He is the founder and Executive Vice President of NetApps. This is a superb blog with just the right tone to make it a must-read. He mentions competitors very often and is unafraid to be complimentary about them. This is one of the main reasons Scoble’s blog is so popular. A company that should never be under-estimated and a blog well worth adding to your aggregator.

[tags]Hu Yoshida, HDS, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC, IBM, HP, NetApp, Network Appliance, Dave Hitz, Storage, Services, Partners, Glasshouse[/tags]