Storage Virtulization

Hitachi TrueNorth Specialization Program

Qualified participants in the Hitachi TrueNorth Partner Program can now leverage a combination of specializations to provide customized services and solutions to their customers in the areas of:

Virtualization Services Specialization – builds partners’ knowledge and capabilities in solving customers’ virtualization implementation challenges of any size. Enables partners to better utilize Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), the industry’s leading storage virtualization platform, to extend their customers’ existing storage assets and provide significant cost savings.

Migration Services Specialization – prepares partners to engage in migration planning and implementation by leveraging the virtualization and tiering capabilities of Hitachi VSP. Only HDS migration solutions allow for migration at the storage level between heterogeneous storage subsystems. With certification, partners can plan and design a solution that migrates their customers’ data quickly with minimal risk.

File and Content Services Specialization – enables partners to identify, design and implement storage solutions for their customers’ unstructured data. Certified partners can add services in Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) enablement, NAS enablement and data discovery with Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS).

Application Specialization and Vertical Solutions – leveraging the Services Specializations and HDS reference architectures that have been tested and proven in HDS labs, partners can add their own unique components to deliver differentiated, low risk and flexible application and vertical solutions to customers.

These solutions combine the company’s best practices with Hitachi Technology Alliance Program applications including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Symantec and VMware among others, to give partners in industries like health and life sciences, government, and communications, media and entertainment a wide range of potential solutions for diverse customer environments.

As IT environments continue to become increasingly more complex, customers are looking for their primary solution provider to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of services to help them better architect, implement and manage IT resources. Adding specific specializations and new vertical market solutions to the Hitachi TrueNorth Partner Program gives our partners greater levels of flexibility to offer custom and advanced services that will significantly expand their trusted advisor status with customers.

-Cheers

CIO: How to be a CSP - Cloud Service Provider

Looking at what the public cloud providers offer and how they operate is instructive and serves as a model for the CIO as CSP.

What are the core competencies that need to be in place to operate as a CSP?

Well, first there are the basics:

Consumer self-service Consumers of IT resources must be able to self-service with no need to interact with another human as part of the resource request. To achieve this usually  web interface with a service catalog of pre-packaged resources is used. This definitely does not mean sending an email off to a help desk requesting that a virtual machine be created on the requester's behalf.

Application abstraction from specific infrastructure. CSPs offer computing capability not specific hardware resources. To put it another way, the virtual machine provided via self-service may migrate around the cloud infrastructure, with no implied promise that it will reside on specific hardware.

Infrastructure funding separate from applications. Many CIOs "play the game" of getting funding for necessary infrastructure spending by tying it to specific application initiatives. Being a CSP means having a generalized pool of resources that applications use but are not tied to; Therefore funding for the infrastructure must be handled separately from application initiatives. Beyond this, one might observe that the overall level of infrastructure spend is likely to increase significantly.

Beyond the basics - The next set of implications are far more revolutionary and challenging for an IT organization, but getting them wrong will result in a failed initiative and a forced march to an external cloud provider.

More in Part II

-Cheers

Cloud Experience Center - EAST

EMC Corporation extended its collaboration with Cisco by jointly launching their Cloud Experience Centers in India today. This is a first-of-its-kind collaboration with EMC Center of Excellence and the Cisco Globalization Center East, creating a lab that provides Indian customers with an opportunity to experience the benefits and reliability of cloud-based IT infrastructure.

The Cloud Experience Centers aim to accelerate customers’ transition to an agile cloud-based infrastructure by enabling proof-of-concepts and helping them experience innovative solutions to some of their critical business challenges. The lab established is a live test bed for customers to come in and validate their business cases in a live environment.

The cloud experience centers in Bangalore will help customers address their concerns related to cloud deployment and evolve their business thereby helping drive greater business impact.

In addition, EMC and Cisco will work together to engineer solutions for the Indian market. These would include reference architectures which can be tested for reliability, security and scale, as well as cross training for engineers and partners on their respective technologies and solutions.

-Cheers