Hitachi leaves ‘cloud’ to likes of Optus, Vigabyte

In Australia for a series of roadshows, CTO Hubert Yoshida described Hitachi as a conservative industry player.

"We're not the first out there with new trends," he said.

"When you're first to market, you may not have a complete solution or understanding of what you need to do. We look at that and try to improve on it."

Yoshida said Hitachi would most likely work with existing and new cloud providers than operate as one.

This contrasts with storage competitor EMC, which has been heavily rumoured to be working on a cloud service, in addition to its Mozy offering.

"We haven't announced anything in the cloud area. I don't know if we'll ever get into the hosted service market ourselves - we prefer to remain on the infrastructure side," Yoshida said.

HDS has sold storage infrastructure that underpins two local ‘cloud' offerings - Vigabyte and Optus Expan managed storage.

"Optus offer clients disk and backup services on demand and leverage our infrastructure as an enabler of that cloud service," said HDS marketing manager Tim Smith.

"[It means] we've had a cloud offering per se for many years."

Vigabyte's cloud offerings use an HDS adaptable modular storage (AMS) array, Smith said.

Yoshida confirmed industry speculation that Singapore is firming as a logical hub for cloud computing systems in the Asia Pacific, in part due to its strong undersea bandwidth links and also trust in its governance and transparency processes.

"Certainly China and India would like to be in that space but the infrastructure isn't there yet," he said.