the storage anarchist

1.005.2 hitachi hits new lows (reposted)

Notice: I withdrew this post yesterday afternoon after receiving a challenge from a commenter who insisted that I was mixing up Hitachi's disk drive results with their storage array business. After carefully reviewing Hitachi's published results, I am convinced that the revenue growth numbers I used for Hitachi's storage business are correct (and exclude HGST). Therefore, I have reinstating my post intact, with the addition of a new "Hitachi Math" section (in blue) below.

Hitachi announced their earnings this past Tuesday (May 13th), and their Storage Solutions results (among others) were particularly gloomy. Not as bad as the free-fall in plasma TV sales in the US that they experienced, maybe, but dismal nonetheless.

In what is their fiscal Q4, once high-flying Hitachi only managed to eek out storage revenues that were down 1% from a year ago and down 3% from last quarter, while both EMC and IBM (if you include Tape) actually grew revenues double digits Y/Y in the same period. It marks a notably downward trend in Hitachi's Storage Solutions revenue growth over the past couple of years, as can be seen in this chart:

And Hitachi's projections for the future was for even more revenue contraction for this quarter and next - shrinking perhaps another 5% before they expect a turn-around, they said.

more hitachi math

As I noted above, the above results were challenged yesterday with an assertion that the "decline" was due to HGST. Fact is, these numbers are taken directly from Hitachi's earnings supplement, where they report "Storage Solutions" (array hardware, software and services) separately from "Hard Disk Drives" (see the top of page 2).

You'll note that Hitachi reports by halves (wouldn't want to make it easy to figure quarterly results now, would you?) - but if you go back to last quarters' results, you can do the math to verify that their Storage Solutions revenues were up 2% Y/Y in FQ3'07 and down 1% Y/Y and 3% Q/Q in FQ4'07 - just like I said.

In researching the accuracy of the numbers used in the chart, I was also allowed to see a couple of financial analyst's reports that included additional revenue insights provided them by HDS executives. While I cannot reprint specifically what these analysts published, I must say that there is something that smells an awful lot like Hitachi Math in their reports. Perhaps they just misunderstood what the HDS execs told them, but the numbers the published in their reports simply don't add up.

More importantly, since HDS only sees revenues excluding Japan, their perspective undoubtedly skews any possible analysis - especially since it's not clear whether HP and/or Sun storage revenues are reported through HDS or if they go directly to Hitachi Ltd. (I'm pretty sure they go directly to Japan).

And if revenues really weren't shrinking, then why the heck would HDS execs be trying to spin the story with Wall Street in the first place?

Bottom line: Hitachi Headquarters reported (and documented) that FQ4'07 Storage Solutions (ex-hard disk) was down 3% Q/Q and down 1% Y/Y - just like I said.

And on top of declining revenues, word on the street is that morale in Hitachi's US field operations is at an all-time low. Nobody seems to know if morale is suffering from the recent out-sourcing of customer service, the collapsing of the former solution/consulting business with the former Hitachi Data Systems subsidiary, or the new Japanese management that are running the new US holding company now. Or maybe it's something else?

Given that the flagship USP-V is nearly a year old, it seems very odd that revenues would be shrinking at a time when the new system should be really starting to gain traction.

It all makes me wonder...
 

0.070: horton hears a hu

My sides hurt.

I ended last week rotflmao!, thanks to IBM's Charlie Andrews and his creative response to flash-based solid state storage (tape, he said...TAPE!). At the time, I figured that nobody could top that for the flat-out wackiest statement of the year.

Apparently, I underestimated Hu Yoshida.

Not content with his first round of uninformed comments about flash SSDs, HDS' so-called "chief technology officer" piled on a few more layers of baloney in an interview with IT Week UK's Dave Bailey:

IT Week:

What are your views on Flash memory storage, which EMC recently announced it would be putting onto its DMX systems?

Hu:

There are a number of problems with Flash memory. First, the price, which can be up to 20 times as much as spinning disks. Secondly, there’s supplier viability – there’s only a few vendors of this technology at the minute. You’ve also got to remember that Flash disks have a rewrite limitation and we need to have some diagnostics to predict when that limit could occur. For hard disks, we have self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology (Smart), but there’s nothing like that for Flash disks. What happens if you’re in the middle of a financial transaction and a write failure occurs, after a write commit? As for performance, just because it’s solid state doesn’t mean it would be any faster than a spinning disk. Remember all those interfaces between your application and the disk are slowing the data transfer rates, so it would be a good idea to benchmark your set-up.

What happens on a write failure, he asks?

LSHIPMP!

OK, well, I almost PMP...

Wait, let me catch my breath...

Come on, he can't be serious...I mean, it's not like disk drives don't suffer from the occasional write failure, yet somehow we manage not to lose data. At least, EMC arrays manage not to lose data - with multiple layers of protection and recovery.

Can it be that Hu is really that out of touch with reality?

 

0.055: obligatory "ibm buys xiv" post

Well, I thought I'd wait a day and let the dust settle on this before I made any comments.

Turns out I saved myself a lot of redundant typing. Chuck Hollis covered much of what I would have said (albeit a bit more elegantly). I share his notion that IBM may be using a Web 2.0 smoke-screen to hide their real intent to use Nextra as either A): a response to DELL+EqualLogic and/or 3PAR; or B): as a replacement for the woefully under-funded (and near-dead) DS8000.

I also think there's a potential C): merge Nextra with SVC to solve SVC's emerging Rube-Goldberg scalability problems and get FlashCopy/Global Mirror compatibility onto a truly scalable platform. I guess that the lack of end-to-end data integrity protection is starting to tarnish the SVC image, with wholesale replacements and exorcisms being held on both sides of the pond (or so I've been told). But that's just me being me, I guess (and perhaps in a manner that's a bit more argumentative than Chuck would have written - I'm sure I'll be hearing from BarryW soon on that one).

Steve Duplessie and Mark Peters over at ESG did an good job of explaining what the Nextra is all about, and lends some credibility that this really might be all about Web 2.0 after all, given IBM's need to find a viable replacement for the now aging and somewhat archaic DR500 (tape is dead, haven't you guys heard yet?). But I don't think you really know what Nextra can really do until you actually hear what the current customers are doing with it, and it seems that all of them have lost their tongues for some odd reason. And for the record, I also think Steve's comments that this is probably at least as much about Moshe as it is about Nextra are right on.

At the very least, on his reputation alone Moshe will probably get IBM an audience with a few of those Wall Street IT shops that have banished Big Blue storage from their data centers because of all the incompatible product churn they've incurred since the days of RAMAC, Iceberg, Sharks and now the dead-end can-you-say-downtime DS8000's.

Not to be outdone, Fellow Blogger Tony Pearson took his own shot at explaining what he thinks is the revolutionary neat new technology in Nextra. Unfortunately, he doesn't have much understanding of the Centera architecture, so he mistakenly thinks is this all new. But heck, even though back before Christmas he was joining forces with TwoEgos in a premature wake for Centera, I'll give him a pass on the fact that Centera's been doing this exact type of blob striping and protection since day one (back at the beginning of 2002).

I'm feeling oddly benevolent to start this New Year for some reason...

0.036: data integrity and virtualized storage

Is your data really safe?

In what many think is a modern-day impression of Chicken Little, Robin Harris has been asking this question over on StorageMojo for quite a while. In his most recent blog post, he refuels his concerns using "evidence" presented in a Data Integrity research paper done by the folks at CERN.

I highly recommend you at least skim that document, as there are some interesting observations in it that could have far reaching ramifications in your own storage environment.

According to this paper, more than 3 of the MP3's or TiVo videos I have in my Terabyte Home are probably corrupted -and I might never know it!

Now Robin takes the 50,000 foot view of this, and comes to the conclusion that the world just may collapse soon if this data integrity issue isn't resolved. He even suggests that HEY! Shouldn't we be doing something NOW to avoid all this?

</sarcasm> (I leave it to the reader to figure where the opening tag belongs )

Good news, Robin: some of us have already been solving this problem. Been doing so for years, in fact...  
 

0.013: customers say the darnedest things

Well, it's the last week of the quarter, and things around work are much like they probably are at virtually every product company on the planet - everybody is on-call to do whatever it takes to close business and get the products shipped in order to recognize the revenue this quarter. Even many of us in engineering will be called in to help close deals - we even have a slogan for this practice: "Everyone Makes Closing Calls" (that's the EMC "squared" version).

Down the road in Franklin and Apex and over the pond in Cork, at this time of the quarter EMC stands for "Empty Manufacturing's Closets," the goal being that everything is in the trucks (or lorries) and well down the road by midnight Saturday, with the manufacturing floors as barren as Old Mother Hubbard's cupboards.

Given this quarterly ritual, and next week's impending US Independence holiday, I expect the blog traffic to be relatively lighter this week than others. So I thought I'd have a little fun between briefings and con-calls and explore a few of the odder things I've heard from customers and prospects over the years.

Regarding the title of today's entry, many of you probably remember the similarly-titled children's show hosted by Bill Cosby back in the 90's. Many of you will also remember that it was Art Linkletter who first ran the concept as a segment on his CBS radio show back in the 1940's and later on his TV show (from 1952 through 1970). Fewer of you will actually remember the name of that show: it was "Art Linkletter's House Party."

There - the genealogy is documented. Now I don't want to see any folderol out in blog-land about who actually invented the darnedest things nor who stole them from Art. Especially not from a certain inebriated mis-information peddler. OK?