The bulltail effect brought about by the continued weakness of the global economy has made the enterprise IT market in 2023 full of uncertainty: on the one hand, enterprises that used to use digital transformation to upgrade their business have begun to show more caution about IT investment; On the other hand, reasons such as de-risking and the blocking of the ** chain also make the differences between markets in different regions more obvious.
As the foundation of the entire enterprise-level IT architecture, the performance of the enterprise-level storage market in 2023 is particularly so: in the last growth cycle, due to the enterprise architecture adjustment brought about by the in-depth application of cloud computing, enterprise-level storage-related technologies, products and solutions have emerged one after another, making the market gain unprecedented attention and development, and the market performance is also particularly eye-catching; However, in 2023, according to the statistical report released by IDC not long ago, in the first three quarters of 2023, the revenue of the global enterprise external storage market will show negative growth, with a year-on-year decrease of 19%, of which the proportion of the Chinese market has increased to 192%, ranking second in the world, but revenue fell by 08% - Obviously, in front of all storage vendors and IT industry practitioners, a more complex market has lost its relevance to previous experience and rules, and how to adjust their products and businesses to meet such market needs has become a problem that everyone must face.
Historically, technology and demand have tended to be mutually reinforcing. From this point of view, storage will have a great potential for development in the future. Xie Yong, Technical Sales Director of Hitachi Vantara China, emphasized in response to the author's question: analyzing the enterprise storage market needs to be considered from two dimensions: "data volume" and "enterprise investment".
Now it seems that the amount of data for enterprise users continues to grow, but the growth of enterprise revenue is sluggish, which is the result of a combination of several reasons. Xie Yong believes that on the one hand, from the perspective of the macro economic situation, the world, including the Chinese market, enterprises will face more economic challenges, so their own investment will be more cautious and rational. But on the other hand, from the perspective of data, the explosive continuous growth of data is an inevitable trend: "First of all, horizontal growth, there are more and more types of data - for example, in the past, we only needed to provide ID numbers to do business in banks, but now we may need to provide fingerprints, voice, etc. at the same time, so the data types and data volumes are increasing; Secondly, the vertical growth of data, in the past, the format of saving video and audio files may be 1920x1080, but now it is 4k, 8k, the definition requirements are higher, and the amount of data is obviously not in the same order of magnitude. ”
For all enterprises, having experienced the baptism of the concept of digital transformation in the previous stage, the basic consensus is that data is valuable. Therefore, in Xie Yong's view, under the premise of the continuous growth of data volume and the correct understanding of the value of data by enterprises, the so-called "investment slowdown" of enterprise users is just waiting for "storage vendors to provide better technology and products", in order to maximize the growing demand for business, and meet the requirements of audit standards, security requirements and controllability of the first chain. But "the momentum of growth will be slower than before".
The market will continue to grow, but at a slower pace – which means that competition will be more pronounced and more intense for all players in the sector. As an important player in the storage industry, Xie Yong talked about how Hitachi Vantara will continue to lead the development direction of storage technology in the future: constantly introducing new technology products, new business models and service models.
From past experience, Hitachi Vantara has always maintained a leading position in technology - whether it is virtualization, SAS backend, or dual-active that once caused a sensation in the industry and led the entire industry standard - and the key factor that ultimately determines whether customers will pay for a new technology after it is introduced to the market is to see whether the technology is helpful to customers and whether it can solve customers' key problems. Xie Yong emphasized that from the perspective of technical products, the advanced direction of Hitachi Vantara is always to meet the actual needs of users.
This can also be confirmed by the development of Hitachi Vantara's technology products in the past period: Traditionally, Hitachi Vantara's dominant product is the storage infrastructure platform used to build the traditional data center of enterprises, that is, the virtual storage platform VSP family. With the advent of the cloud computing era, when realizing that hybrid cloud will become the mainstream development trend of enterprise storage in the future, "Hitachi Vantara's idea is very bold - to put SVOS on VSP and the core intellectual property of Hitachi Vantara's core intellectual property on the cloud and software-defined, which is Hitachi Data's approach: it not only adheres to tradition, but also innovates." As a result, Hitachi Vantara has successively launched Hitachi software-defined block storage VSSB, file content software HCSF, object storage HCP, software-defined object storage HCP Cloud Scale and hyper-converged solutions for cloud deployment, so as to provide enterprise users with a complete data storage solution from traditional data centers to private clouds and public clouds, and then meet the data storage needs of enterprise users for hybrid cloud applications.
From Hitachi Vantara's point of view, winning the trust of customers by introducing new products or solutions that are closer to the needs of the market and better meet the needs of customers is the foundation for winning opportunities in the new competitive environment. For example, Xie Yong said: "When Hitachi Vantara released the VSP 5200 and VSP 5600, it introduced the DIP (Data-in-Place) technology. With this technology, enterprise users can upgrade to higher-end storage systems by replacing the controller without repeating investment, the device serial number remains the same, the data does not need to be migrated, and all software licenses purchased on the old system can still be used. Another example is the new feature in VSP, Virtual RAID, which is a new technology that completely subverts traditional RAID; Another example is the traditional Fiber Channel in the cloud environment, and now we will use NVMe over TCP - IP-based NVMe storage network to make it more suitable for the network in the cloud environment. ”
In addition to adopting this emerging technology, the role of AI in promoting storage technology is still more from a pragmatic perspective: to promote the continuous development of AI technology and meet the needs of more enterprise users for the application of AI technology, in addition to adopting this emerging technology.
Today's AI is different from the AI of the past: the current AI is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or large models. From Hitachi Vantara's point of view, we have two dimensions that can play a valuable role: the first is to use AGI technology to help customers achieve intelligent O&M management, such as the management tools in Hitachi Ops Center, which use some AI preset results and AI-driven software; In the future, our products will definitely integrate more and more AI functions in management, operation and maintenance, which is indisputable. Another dimension is for supporting and satisfying AI application infrastructure. Xie Yong said that among the factors that determine the AGI and AI large models themselves, there are three troikas: data (customers), models (mathematical scientists) and computing power (infrastructure). "Infrastructure is closely related to Hitachi Vantara: there are three important components in the infrastructure: compute, networking, and storage. In other words, the development of AI will bring more demand for high-performance storage. In complex high-performance computing (HPC), AI, and enterprise-level application scenarios, the separation of storage and computing is the mainstream trend in the future. It is not possible to put the GPU server purchased by the customer to store it, because from the perspective of the large model, the storage is placed on a third-party storage platform, which can be more convenient for performance management. This will bring a new and huge market to the storage industry: where is the data stored for large models? How can you make it mobilize efficiently? Especially for composite large files, small files, audio, and some data collected by sensors, these require the scalability of the storage system to be very good, so higher requirements are put forward for the development of technology and products; This is also a huge opportunity for Hitachi Vantara. ”
At the product level, Hitachi Vantara's most recent new product launch was at the end of last year, on October 11, 2023, Hitachi Vantaraa announced the launch of a single hybrid cloud data platform, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One). The platform provides a common data plane for structured and unstructured data in block, file, and object storage, allowing enterprises to run different types of applications anywhere (on-premises and in the public cloud), thereby eliminating the complex management model that many enterprises face today – perhaps the biggest headache for enterprise users in recent times about the continuous iterative upgrade of IT systems.
VSP One cannot simply be understood as a product innovation, or even simply characterize it as a product: it is somewhat similar to a concept or concept innovation, which will integrate our previously scattered products, including VSP, HCP, and HCSF, through a unified logic and specific solution. Xie Yong said that VSP One is an epoch-making platform product, because in his opinion, VSP ONE's concept and ideas are very leading, "We call it a unified hybrid cloud data platform, because this platform has cross-file, object, and even mainframe can be put together to provide the underlying architecture, and then there is a unified management layer and operation and maintenance layer to provide different services, which can help customers reduce many independent data islands, independent storage and management tasks before." ”
In the past, even Hitachi Vantara, which is quite advanced in storage technology, could not have achieved this. Xie Yong explained: According to the concept of VSP One, in the past, block data storage and object storage could not be adapted to each other at the bottom of the data architecture, because they were logically different: although both were SSDs at the physical layer, the management layer and encapsulation layer added to them were different for blocks, objects and files. But with VSP One, these problems don't exist, and users get a unified data platform. "It's not just a product. Xie Yong said.
In addition to the leadership in terms of concept and the ability to integrate its own products, in fact, the biggest change that VSP One has brought to Hitachi Vantara to a large extent is that Hitachi Vantara is no longer just an independent product with certain functions, but a platform, a platform that users can independently participate in building and building. Not only is there more user engagement and choice, but it also makes Hitachi Vantara more malleable, and the service model and business mode will also undergo more subtle changes.
The launch of VSP One has given enterprise users more choices: in the past, there may have only been one solution; But now customers can freely combine between the all-in-one model or the software-defined model according to their actual needs. In the case of Hitachi Vantara, we will also shift from the previous Capex (capital expenditure) model to the OPEX (operating expenses) model, and recommend that customers purchase Hitachi Vantara's products on a pay-as-you-go basis on a pay-as-you-go basis, which is actually a simpler model based on global experience. Xie Yong said.
Obviously, once VSP One is launched, Hitachi Vantara will be closer to the real business of its users, and it will face more different needs, and its operating model and service model will inevitably change. In addition to having to adapt to market demand and take the lead, Xie Yong stressed that from the technical and product level, "we also hope that we can be closer to the needs of our customers and respond more quickly to the market and market demand." ”
Write at the end:
The impact of the past few years on the entire global economy has been profound and disruptive for the IT industry: all previous experiences have been challenged and all rules need to be restructured.
Today's storage market is very 'volume', and enterprise users have higher requirements for product performance, reliability, and service. However, I believe that in the process of exploring new rules in the new environment, customers will still recognize and pay for good technology, good products and good services, but in the future, customers will be more rational in making IT procurement decisions. In 2024, challenges still exist, but we are still full of confidence: after all, there is change to make new attempts, and only by trying can there be new possibilities. Hitachi Vantara's products, sales model, operation model and other aspects will continue to innovate in the future and explore new possibilities to adapt to new market needs. Xie Yong said.