The VARBusiness Interview: Hitachi Data Systems' Scott Genereux

VARBusiness

VB: Can you talk about the channel strategy for TagmaStore?
Genereux: A lot of people struggle a little with this product because they associate it as such a large box. But the reality is it's a storage server platform and you can hook anything behind it, meaning high-end storage, high-performance storage, serial ATA storage and other people' products. It becomes a great opportunity for a reseller to show some value. This allows somebody to go in and really have an in-depth conversation about the applications they're running, what the are requirements based on those applications and understanding the environment. And out of that now, there's a storage platform that really allows them to configure it based on the customers' needs. It's a huge value proposition for our resellers.

VB: What percentage of these will be sold through the channel vs. your direct sales force?
Genereux: I don't know if we have come up with a number on that, to be honest. We look at our channel and our resellers and our partners and our direct sales force overall. We really try not to treat them differently internally. That's from training to product rollouts to segmentation. To be fair, we have some resellers who probably don't have the capability of selling this box.

VB: So what type of VAR would be capable of selling the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform?
Genereux: It really has to be somebody who is looking to offer the value proposition, which is this idea of really trying to show value and understand the customers' environment, probably somebody who has a pretty decent professional services organization because there are a lot of professional services you can bundle with this. When you think about just using virtualization or universal replication, customers are going to need help with that.

VB: Should anyone who had been selling Lightning be qualified to sell TagmaStore as well?
Genereux: I think so. We went out and presented to a decent size professional service practice and they see this as a great opportunity because you really are going in leading in with a solution. You go in and say "I want to understand your environment." They love the idea of that. Because now they're not going in and saying hey I have some hardware. There are a lot of resellers we have who sell our services and software that don't like going in with a box. So this gives them a great opportunity to go in and really understand the infrastructure of the environment and what's going on and then turning around and being able to propose a solution.

VB: Looking at this question another way, do you see this product being suitable for partners you don't already have?
Genereux: There are always a lot of VARs that are out there that have made strategic decisions to partner with maybe one or two storage vendors. So I do see an opportunity here that if you're an EMC large reseller, to sell [TagmaStore] because it's not about taking out EMC, it's about enhancing the infrastructure that they sold. For instance, if there are large resellers that are only EMC resellers, and there are, now all of a sudden they can go into a customer and say, "Don't rip out your infrastructure and put Hitachi in, but implement a universal storage platform in addition to your EMC environment, and I'm able to give you these features and functions that EMC can't deliver today without threatening to rip everything out." It's less threatening because it's complementary.

VB: Are you offering this as a software-only solution as opposed to bundling it with your hardware?
Genereux: Technically, it's the box. You could sell it as a box. It's going to be hard to get the value out of it because if all somebody wants is cheap disk, there's a lot of cheap disk opportunities out there.

VB: Now you provide connectivity to other systems via the SMI-S standard. That presumably means it has to connect with hardware that is SMI-S compatible?
Genereux: Most of the industry leaders, ourselves, EMC and IBM are all supporting SMI-S.

VB: Nevertheless, there are trade-offs with SMI-S vs. native connectivity. Where will we see some of those tradeoffs?
Genereux: I can tell you right now in our labs we have all the vendors tested and hooked up into one way or another. We're not concerned with the question of will it work, we are obviously finishing up our testing, which we need until the end of the year, but the reality is we've done a lot of testing with this and we've had some customers in the early customer ship do some testing for us of other peoples' stuff. The point is, we're pretty confident that that's going to be a non issue.

VB: How would you compare this to IBM's SAN Volume Controller?
Genereux: There are people out there today who have virtualization software. There are start-ups, IBM has it, predominantly an appliance. The issue there is reliability, availability, and scalability issues. Then there's people who have hardware who really don't have the software to do it. We believe we are the first company where they have crossed together where we have the right hardware platform to run the virtualization software, scalability-wise and performance-wise. That's probably the biggest uniqueness, in-band in the controller, large-scale virtualization performance. We don't think anyone else can do that today. If you're going to install at Morgan Stanley, I can guarantee you that our box will outperform and do everything the infrastructure needs to do, not just little things along the way.

VB: What role does this have for SMB customers?
Genereux: There's no question, a large enterprise, high availability, high performance customer is where this box makes sense. But one of the biggest issues people are having with midrange products, which is what small and medium businesses are buying, is the lack of functionality. It's typically cheap disks, usually some reliability issues, not always high performance, then you run into the question of feature and function. Don't get me wrong, there are certain prospects who would never need this functionality. But here's another nice thing: Take an SMB today, let's say a start-up. The biggest struggle with start-ups is how much infrastructure do they buy and you never put in the infrastructure that's most robust because you only can afford so much. So let's say they go out and buy a bunch of serial ATA 9500s or [EMC] Clariions and their business grows. All of a sudden they realize that uptime is extremely important because now they're online all the time. You could throw out your whole infrastructure, which in the past that's what people did do. Or you install Universal Storage Platform. You would put that layer in front of their current architecture so they don't have to get rid of it. It's still viable, they can use it for e-mail archiving and low-utilization stuff, and then you start adding in the features and functions and the high availability, high performance disk. It's a great model. It's found money.