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Like storage systems, IT organizations tend to get more complex over time. The complexity affects the decision-making process involving the storage architects/administrators and the business owners responsible for the applications and information. There may be layers of groups with varying responsibilities between the staff that needs to develop and implement the storage technologies, and those who truly understand the requirements.

Having one or two levels of filtering makes it much more difficult to understand the needs of the “customer,” who in this case is the business owners or their staffs. Much of the technology optimization process involves understanding what is required and includes byplay between architects and the actual customer. The lack of that interaction and base understanding of customer needs often results in a solution that fails to address key needs and planning for the changes that will occur.

Optimizing organizational structure is perceived to be a difficult task. The changes affect many influential people and groups. The need is obvious, but the complex organization structures that have developed over time may be deep-rooted and require a commitment and direction from the most senior levels in IT. Working towards data center optimization and improved storage efficiency is much more difficult without this commitment and direction. Often, the process brings compromises that reduce the project’s effective value.

Understanding the problems in working toward an optimized environment means understanding the organization structure and those limitations. Any storage optimization strategy must take into account the structure as well as technology and products. This brings about more work, but it is the current situation in many IT operations.

It is often said that data center-level server virtualization projects created a renewed demand for networked storage, both NAS and SAN.

If that’s true, then efforts to virtualize desktops–aka virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects–will create renewed demand for high-performance storage, both network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN).

Storage performance is a major determinant in successful deployments of VDI. Why? VDI is a storage input/output-intensive environment.

When you lift the hood to find out what’s going on inside a disk array that’s supporting virtual desktops, you see the following:

The typical virtual desktop running Windows apps is moving almost 1MB of data per second with an access rate of approximately 10 I/O’s per second (averaging 100KB per I/O).

Characterizing a rule of thumb for the I/O profile for VDI can be very difficult. VDI generates data blocks that vary dramatically in size, from 512 bytes to 2MB. Read/write ratios can vary from 30/70 to 60/40. Also, accesses are almost completely random.

All of the which creates a storage environment where both performance and management simplicity are appreciated. Some of the attributes of modern storage architecture will be in demand as a result. These include:

• Solid state disk (SSD) for performance, implemented within the storage array level as either “tier zero” in a tiered storage array or as cache.
• The ability to generate thousands of writable snapshot copies to quickly provision desktop images.
• Thin provisioning to allocate disk capacity on demand rather than pre-allocating capacity.
• Automated provisioning assistance.

VDI is quickly rising in popularity within the education, health care, and government segments. Others will join during 2012. Getting the storage environment right will be a critical consideration for all however as IT administrators across the business and organizational spectrum will witness the same basic storage requirements. Therefore, having some way to run a reliable test phase before a major production VDI deployment is an absolute requirement. Modern storage architectures that support the attributes outlined above will also be highly sought-after.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — February 14, 2012 — Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), today announced that Hitachi NAS Platform, powered by BlueArc®, has achieved exceptional benchmark results from VDI-IOmark testing based on the delivery of high-performance, scalable and file-based tools essential for managing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments. Hitachi NAS Platform has a superior ability to offload critical VDI functionality and delivers massive scalability and clustering capabilities. This is vital for organizations to drive operational efficiencies that further extend their investments in virtual environments, to reduce operational costs and to improve centralized management of enterprise virtual desktop implementations.

The VDI-IOmark is a storage-centric benchmark that measures storage performance metrics with VDI workloads. By using I/O replay, the benchmark measures the I/O capabilities of storage systems under actual workloads, without costly server and application setup. VDI-IOmark recreates typical usage, including boot storms and steady state operations.

“We are pleased that Hitachi Data Systems is the first to announce their VDI-IOmark performance results,” said Russ Fellows, senior partner, Evaluator Group. “IT users can be confident that VDI-IOmark results provide an accurate and fair method for comparing storage systems that support VDI workloads. With these results, Hitachi Data Systems is demonstrating its leadership position in the VDI market by highlighting not only the high performance of Hitachi NAS Platform for VDI workloads, but also the excellent price/performance levels achieved. The tested configuration demonstrates the ability to support more than 1,500 standard VDI workers with a single, midrange Hitachi NAS controller. Scaling Hitachi NAS Platform up to 8 nodes offers further possibilities for supporting significantly larger and more I/O intensive VDI workloads.”

“Selecting the right storage architecture is essential to virtualized environments, especially as those environments evolve to include thousands of virtual machines, virtual desktops and business critical applications,” said Ravi Chalaka, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi NAS Platform allows customers to gain cost-effective, scalable capacity and performance benefits through virtualization across server, storage and desktop infrastructures. This enables greater efficiencies across the data center, and allows more effective deployment and management of virtual IT environments.”

Hitachi NAS Platform for VDI Environments: VDI-IOmark Benchmark Highlights

Storage plays an important role in VDI deployments, and is often a determining factor for the performance, scalability and efficiency of the overall system. VDI deployments require a combination of features from storage designated to augment and enhance the unique VDI lifecycle and workloads encountered. Hitachi NAS Platform delivers the essential storage capabilities required for organizations looking to VDI for a centralized desktop application management solution that ensures data security while reducing IT administration costs generated from the explosion of personal productivity devices. The exceptional Hitachi NAS Platform VDI-IOmark results were achieved through scalable, high-performance capabilities that easily manage I/O storms while imposing no additional management overhead.

Customers benefit from the following features:

• More Virtual Desktops: The VDI-IOmark benchmark results indicate that Hitachi NAS Platform can support an industry leading 1,526 standard VDI workers and 768 knowledge VDI workers.
• Performance Efficiency: All data is dynamically and transparently cached, and array-based writable clones support solid-state disk (SSD) and spinning media for high-performance and storage efficiency.
• Space Saving Clones: BlueArc® JetClone delivers unlimited, space saving, file-level, writable clones allowing the desktop administrator to instantly clone VDI instances without impacting the I/O of the virtual machine or increasing storage capacity. BlueArc JetClone has storage-based clones coupled with 96GB read/write storage cache, which virtually eliminates the impact to back-end disk subsystems experienced during boot storms and login operations.
• Large File System Size: BlueArc SiliconFS 256TB file system for Hitachi NAS Platform is many times larger than other traditional NAS systems and aids in reducing the complexity of managing storage overhead providing administrators with virtually unlimited hosts per physical and virtual file server. Dedicating a virtual volume to a single host or group provides the administrator with fine-grained control over performance priorities and capacity allocation.
• Simplified Management: BlueArc JetCenter integrates with VMware vCenter and enables instantaneous or policy-based snapshots that may be used as recovery points allowing VDI instances to be restored within minutes. The number of snapshots supported is important and Hitachi NAS Platform provides virtually unlimited snapshots – approximately four times more than competing systems. Support of this software will be extended to the full Hitachi NAS Platform in the second quarter of calendar year 2012.

About VDI-IOmark

The VDI-IOmark organization was founded to develop fair and accurate methods for comparing vendor’s storage products under various real-world workloads. The VDI-IOmark benchmark was specifically designed to test storage systems running VDI desktops and applications; enabling IT users to quickly and accurately characterize a storage system’s performance while supporting a VDI workload. More information about the organization is available at http://www.vdi-iomark.org.

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About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer ROI, unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. With a vision that IT must be virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. With more than 5,400 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Hitachi Data Systems products, services and solutions are trusted by the world’s leading enterprises, including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 and more than 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100. Hitachi Data Systems believes that data drives our world – and information is the new currency. To learn more, visit: http://www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2010 (ended March 31, 2011) consolidated revenues totaled 9,315 billion yen ($112.2 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hitachi.com.

© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2012. All Rights Reserved. Hitachi is a registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Hitachi Data Systems is a registered trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. in the United States and other countries.

Press Contacts:

Hitachi Data Systems
Melissa Rossiter
(408) 970-4849
melissa.rossiter@hds.com

Lois Paul & Partners
Brandi Ellerbee
(512) 638-5327
brandi_ellerbee@lpp.com

Boulder, CO (PRWEB) February 14, 2012. VDI-IOmark releases the first public benchmark results with Hitachi Data Systems on their Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS), powered by BlueArc®.  Recognizing data storage is a major success component for VDI deployments, and that there has been no easy way to validate storage performance except to build a proof of concept, the members of VDI-IOmark and Evaluator Group have worked closely to release a repeatable storage performance benchmark culminating in the first release with Hitachi Data Systems.

“This is the result of a lot of work from our clients and vendor partners, across North America and Asia,” said Russ Fellows, Senior Partner of Evaluator Group and architect of the VDI-IOmark. “This first set of many announced results will provide the end user community a standard measurement that realistic, attainable and predictable.”

“By announcing these results we are demonstrating the scale and price / performance of the Hitachi NAS Platform,” said Ravi Chalaka, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. “Calibrated with other internal lab tests, the VDI-IOmark shows a defined cost per standard and heavy workload VDI user.”

The VDI-IOmark measures storage system performance using real VDI user workloads. It does not use simulations or synthetics to approximate.  The foundation members of VDI-IOmark have set benchmark criteria with the following performance values:

• For the steady-state workload:
• 80% of response times for I/O’s must not exceed 50ms
• All storage must reside on the storage system under test
• The value reported corresponds directly to actual users
• For the boot workload:
• There is no limit to maximum I/O response times
• All boot operations must complete in less than 2 minutes
• The value reported indicates the number of desktops able to boot

Other reporting criteria include:

• Storage system configuration and tested environment must be reported
• All storage for measured VDI users must reside on the storage system tested
• Total list price for storage system tested must be reported

More information on Theory of Operation and the Hitachi NAS Platform results are available at the VDI-IOmark website or from Hitachi Data Systems, respectfully. VDI-IOmark for VMware View is available via license to end users, vendors and test labs.  End User license may be obtained free of charge for 30 days for internal evaluation.

About VDI-IOmark

VDI-IOmark is dedicated to helping IT professionals and Vendors effectively measure and compare storage system performance while running VDI workloads.  VDI-IOmark was created by Evaluator Group in 2011 in order to assist IT users with accurately comparing storage performance.  Storage system performance results are published, and more information about the organization is available at

www.vdi-iomark.org

About Evaluator Group

Evaluator Group Inc. is dedicated to helping IT professionals and Vendors create and implement storage strategies and enable companies to meet their business requirements cost effectively. As a premier IT analyst firm, Evaluator Group has continued to provide unbiased analysis and education for IT professionals since its inception in 1997.  For more information see www.evaluatorgroup.com .

For more information on VDI see VDI Evaluation Guide: Planning and Considerations

Follow us on Twitter: @vdi-iomark  or @evaluator_group

Press Contact

For more information about Evaluator Group, Contact Kate at 303.221.7867 x1008 or kate@evaluatorgroup.com.

In comes contextual interviewing -  Contextual interviewing is best done with a large group of interviews where you can choose the person, the topics, then interview and allow them to comment.   Here the old saying I like to use comes into play, “Tell me where you stand before you tell me where you sit.” If you interview a storage administrator about a data base feature or a data base administrator you will most likely get very different answers and perspectives on the value. Additionally you can take body language notes. You can sub classify with the various roles and create a broader understanding of what something means with the statement of  ” XXXX <job position> states this value of about using YYY feature.

Contextual is best used to discover motivations, emotions and longer term trends. It is especially good at understanding trade-offs and choices when presented with multidimensional problem, such as the cost–benefit equation. In the book Blue Ocean Strategies they create a value curve that weights the value of different features in a product. For example when interviewing nurses about a medical kit they found no value to cost reduction but easy to open and well labeled packaging is of high value. For doctors compliance with procedure protocols is the highest value. Packaging size matters most for remote and first responders.

This type of qualitative information can be weighted and typed to the value chain persona. Then resources can be placed appropriately and focus on the areas where significant innovation will have the most affect.

Just some thoughts you can weave into your planning processes.

Part 1: Decision Making and Surveys: 4 Things to Consider

The reasons for resistance can be rationalized effectively by management making excuses. That does not mean these reasons are correct, it just puts perspective on why seemingly incomprehensible choices are made that defy logic when considered in the entirety of IT management.

I’ve heard these reasons for not making a strategic change:

• Avoidance of risk. Making a change to introduce a new technology introduces risk of some type. The risk is really about potential failure and the implications of that failure on the organization and the people making the decision.

• Inability to schedule the time to implement a new technology or process. “We don’t have time to do this” is a common explanation for not doing something. The conversation goes into limited budgets for staffing and not enough people to take on the extra work. The advantages that might be gained by the implementation are typically dismissed out of hand.

• Limited budget to invest in the technology. The blame for this is usually placed on “executive management” or “the business” making choices that would limit IT’s ability to invest in new technology.

• IT decision makers want to wait until other organizations have proven the technology works. There usually is some justification here because we all know of past products and technologies that did not last for an extended period of time. Organizations want assurance that they are not investing in a transient technology. In IT, the time expectation for something new is perceived to be 10 years.

• Complexity introduced into IT over time increases risk or makes change more difficult. This means that over time, the effort to avoid complexity proves too great and causes a greater resistance to change in the future.

The negatives for resisting new technologies or new procedures in IT are easy to argue with. Many new technologies can bring value to organizations that properly implement them. These include tiered storage systems with solid-state drive (SSD) technology, storage virtualization, scale-out NAS storage, data reduction technologies, IT as a Service, and ‘big data’ analytics. To not move forward with technologies and processes that will have staying power means missing economic advantages. The lack of advances in IT can have a parallel effect on the IT leadership.

Changes will have to be made eventually, and may be more costly the longer they are put off. I recently heard about an organization looking to replace a data center because it was more than eight-years-old. The justification was that the efficiency gain of a new data center was worth the financial investment. That might be true statistically, but it does not seem to be an intelligent overall investment. Evolving through the introduction of new technologies, improvements in changing procedures, and educating IT personnel has to be a better answer than a complete discard and start over

But if the barriers – the arguments given to avoid introduction of technology or change – are so overwhelming and inhibit greater efficiencies, it may be the path of least resistance. The force on a body at rest — the inertia of IT to not do something new — may not have enough impact to start the motion forward. Education on the technologies and economic advantages need to have the net force to move IT forward.

Then there was the telling by a vendor who sought to hold a looooong discussion via the email.  My conclusion – does this person truly think they can develop a relationship, let alone just communicate via electronic alphabetical letters?

I myself have been guilty of this – thinking email communication sufficed. Yet to understand and observe if it is understood, the best communication is back and forth. It is why the planes are full of business people. It is why when we educate at Evaluator Group, the most valuable part is the whiteboard and application examples.  It is why one of my favorite communicators is Chad Sakac of EMC. His ability to have a conversation transcends his marketing enthusiasm, so instead of rolling our eyes collectively at hyperbole (which can be over the top), we engage knowing there is depth and breadth and at any time we could challenge and discuss. But that doesn’t come on day one when we are communicating– only after the proof and communication value is established.

I believe those that are of the science and technical skills need to be very aware of this truth, especially when dealing with the lines of business.  What may seem as a simple technical question or request can be misconstrued or assumed, especially in those areas that we are most knowledgeable in or are routine.  Questions are opportunities for communication.

To stay out of this potential mess, a few rules:

1. If it is important, communicate via voice to voice and if possible face to face.
2. If you are presenting, pause within or after a slide and engage.  Even if this is the 10^th time you have pitched – remember it is the person’s first time they have heard this from you.
3. Ask questions if none are asked. Imagine what you would be looking for if you were in front of the person.
4. Touchy, inflammatory or complex topics should be done face to face and if not possible, voice to voice.

That is unless you do not care for the relationship….