In May 2007, Wikibon analyzed Hitachi's thin provisioning announcement and suggested the race is on for competitive responses in high-end block-based storage. Since that time, EMC and IBM announced their intention to announce thin provisioning on block-based storage and 3PAR has made enhancements to its increasingly popular InServ product line.
In January 2008, EMC announced Virtual Provisioning for the DMX-4 which has carried through to V-Max. IBM announced thin provisioning for its SAN Volume Controller in mid-2008 and the DS8000 now supports thin provisioning as well.
Of the competitors, 3PAR is the most aggressive, moving to try and distance itself from the pack, while IBM and EMC are playing catch up in the thin provisioning game. 3PAR's announcement of Virtual Domains, a software capability that allows the logical partitioning of a 3PAR InServ array of up to 2,000 domains, was noteworthy as an attempt to differentiate. 3PAR again enhanced its product line in October 2009 in an effort to maintain its lead in thin provisioning.
3PAR seems to be the one company executing on delivery of a storage services/utility storage model by providing security, access control, monitoring and virtualization capabilities that can safely subdivide storage resources based on policies and enable chargeback to users. This is a powerful vision is is appealing to cloud service providers. While companies such as EMC attempt to pin down 3PAR as a 'feature company,' 3PAR continues to leverage its custom ASIC design to improve storage efficiencies.
3PAR however is much smaller than these larger players and extremely focused on growing in its space at the moment. The storage industry is looking for clear direction, vision and leadership in the increasingly active space for storage virtualization, thin provisioning and heterogeneous tiered storage management. As well, no vendor has clearly articulated a clear vision for scale out clustered non-disruptive data movement.
Hitachi's consistent execution, while vital, underscores the need for a more compelling 3-5 year vision.
Action Item: Product-oriented messages, while necessary and important, will not suffice in helping users chart a course for the near-to-mid term. Vendors are staring at a major opportunity to articulate what the future of storage will look like and lay out a multi-year plan for customers to follow. Virtualized data centers, more efficient technology utilization , tiered storage, heterogeneous storage management and non-disruptive data movement are key underpinnings of this vision as is the accommodation of more efficient and simpler cloud infrastructure services.
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