Hitachi Targets Indian HDD Market

Robert Chu, VP – APAC, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies discusses the future of hybrid technology in hard disk drives and Hitachi’s enterprise strategy for the Indian market.

What are the latest trends in the enterprise disk drive space?

There is a continual demand for Hard Disk Drive (HDD) products offering greater storage capacity and higher performance, all within a shrinking form factor. One of the most significant technologies affecting the industry today is the transition from parallel bus interfaces to their evolved serial counterparts that is Serial SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA). SAS hard drives are now being used in mission-critical enterprise environments with applications such as online transaction processing and data analysis.

Along with the transition to SAS, the enterprise HDD space is also experiencing another transition from 3.5-inch 10,000 RPM drives to 2.5-inch 10,000 RPM drives. These smaller form factor hard drives are providing customers with cost-effective storage solutions that allow them to strike the right price/performance balance for servers.

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What is your view on the future of hybrid drives? Could you brief us about the newly formed Hybrid Storage Alliance?

We believe hybrid has potential, but right now it just doesn’t offer the desired value. Vista and hybrid technology continue to evolve over time.

The Hybrid Storage Alliance is a marketing organisation formed in January 2007 comprising leading hard drive manufacturers, to provide education about the benefits that flash memory brings to hard disk drives. There were three forecasted benefits to hybrid hard drives: power efficiency, system response time and durability. Hitachi has found through the development work on current generation products that while some performance improvement was obtained, it wasn’t significant enough to be of value to our customers. We believe hybrid technology has great potential for use in hard disk drives and we will continue to work on hybrid technology for future generation products.

How do you see storage technologies evolving over the next few years?

Storage will be marked by widespread proliferation of hard drives in non-traditional applications such as automobile navigation and entertainment systems, digital video recorders, game boxes and so on. To address these more non-traditional applications, hard drives are being customised for specific applications, such as for extreme conditions of the automotive environment or to address the unique needs of video streaming applications. And finally, to satisfy the ever increasing consumer appetite for digital content, there will be continued doubling of storage capacity every couple of years, which will help the hard drive keep its value proposition of low cost and high capacity.

What is your enterprise strategy for the Indian market?

With a new and broader enterprise product portfolio including 3.5-inch 15,000 RPM and 10,000 RPM hard drives, our new small form factor 10,000 RPM hard drive and our 1TB Enterprise SATA hard drive, we will continue to satisfy the broad needs of India’s enterprise customers. Our focus remains on accelerating the transition from Ultra320 (traditional) SCSI to SAS and from 3.5-inch 10K RPM to 2.5-inch 10K RPM hard drives. Hitachi’s broad product portfolio allows India’s enterprise customers to create infrastructures with the optimal mix of hard drives that address the performance, power, capacity and cost parameters for the varying storage and data-access requirements that exist in the storage hierarchy.