Hitachi VSP E Series
In this blog
Hitachi Vantara storage sets a foundation of dependability, resiliency and agility throughout its storage product line. Hitachi VSP E-Series spans three different storage models which support block workloads. They contain enterprise features that can achieve enterprise performance without a rip-and-replace mentality.
Hitachi's midrange storage offering enables small and midsize businesses the features and functions that large enterprises find necessary in specific workload form factors. We will work to understand your needs today and into the future, so you do not get pigeonholed into an all-flash array that cannot support multiple media types. Instead, Hitachi leads your consolidation efforts by placing workloads within the right price per GB media, delivering quality of service across all workloads. Guaranteeing 100 percent data availability and mobility throughout the lifespan of the storage solution and beyond.
Hitachi Vantara has taken the time to understand that when consolidating into one storage platform, an all-flash array (AFA) can become costly for workloads that do not require all-flash storage performance. VSP Hybrid array configurations enable both flash and spinning disk types to work in harmony within a consolidated storage offering. When workloads demand flash performance at scale, all-flash equipped VSP E-series models deliver industry-leading all-flash technology within a single array.
For mixed workloads where some applications require all-flash performance, but other workloads do not, a hybrid array containing both flash and HDD spinning disks can provide the right mix of performance at a lower price point. The flash drives and HDD drives can be defined in separate pools, or they can be combined into a multi-tier Hitachi Dynamically Tiered (HDT) pool that automatically places the data on the right performance tier to best utilize the price and performance tiers optimally.
The quality of enterprise features Hitachi has enabled within the mid-range class combined with the ability to consolidate all the customers' workloads gives Hitachi superiority in this market. As storage technologies continue to emerge, Hitachi has pioneered the use of standard components and operating systems to support adopting these technologies efficiently and without data downtime to application data. Systems capable of Flash and NVMe technologies must bring with them the ability to provide active/active controllers end to end. Having a storage system with flash and active/active controllers allows data encryption and deduplication features to operate with minimal impact on the application and to provide higher levels of availability. With Hitachi, we will not prioritize these features over your application IO. Instead, we will ensure you are adopting new technologies without compromising performance to gain efficiency.
Midrange agility
Hitachi has simplified your experience by delivering the entire VSP portfolio, with standard operating systems, management tools, APIs, and hardware components. Select from the E590 and E790 with 2U controllers, or E1090 with 4U controllers. Disk trays of each of these systems are 2U and are interactive components between the models. Small Form Factor (SFF) 2U drive trays support (24) SAS SSD's and/or 10K RPM SAS HDD's. Large Form Factor (LFF) 2U drive trays support (12) 7.2K RPM NL-SAS drives in a variety of capacities. In addition to these 2U drive chassis, the E-Series arrays also support a 4U 60-drive "dense" expansion tray known as the DB60, which supports both 2.4TB 10K SAS HDD's as well as 6TB, 10TB, 14TB, and 18TB 7.2K NL-SAS HDD's.
Powering all Hitachi VSP models, both the midrange E-Series as well as the enterprise 5000-series arrays, is Hitachi's Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS). SVOS is the firmware and controller-based feature functionality included with every Hitachi VSP storage array. From the smallest to the largest, they all run the same SVOS firmware with the same enterprise class features such as storage pools and tiering, thin provisioning, virtualization, volume snapshots and clones, remote replication, Global Active Device (GAD) clustering, etc.
Hitachi continues to develop and enhance SVOS technologies to extend capabilities beyond dynamic pools and tiering. This includes the use of a Global Active device (GAD) to enable multiple storage systems as an active/active disaster recovery scenario. GAD utilizes SVOS's virtualization capabilities to create a virtual storage machine that spans across two VSP arrays located in two data centers up to 500 km apart and creates an active/active metro cluster that synchronously mirrors all writes between the two physical storage arrays.
Applications have concurrent read and write access from either data center. This provides a zero RPO, zero RTO DR solution that does not require traditional DR failover from your primary site to your DR site. In the event of a site failure, data is immediately available at the other site and is an identical mirror of the data at the failed site. There is no need to suspend replication or promote replicated secondary volumes to primary volumes. The application can failover at the host level and continue to access the data with no interruption.
With SVOS, over one hundred different arrays from both Hitachi and their competitors can be virtualized behind Hitachi controllers. This allows Hitachi to extend the features and functions of SVOS on new arrays to older systems to extend the life of these older model arrays and can be used to replace competitors for simple and phased migrations to the Hitachi Storage portfolio. This also provides a "Single Pane of Glass" management for all the arrays for data services such as snapshots and replication, all controlled by SVOS on the new VSP array, eliminating the need for the storage administrator to know and use management software from multiple vendors. This can also eliminate costly licensing for these features from the other storage vendors as SOVS is now handling all the functionality and the virtualized external storage is simply raid protected capacity storage.
The VSP E Series supports the clustering of up to 65 systems. This feature is called Virtual Storage Scale Out (VSSO). Powered by Hitachi Ops Center Suite and using the inherent virtualization and GAD capabilities built into SVOS, the VSP E-Series solution can be used as a single virtual system to host, delivering federated management, data protection, and automation across the cluster to simplify your infrastructure.
Midrange resiliency
Any interruption to data availability jeopardizes revenue generation, brand reputation, and contractual obligations. For your business to succeed and continue to innovate, you need to guarantee that the foundation of your business infrastructure is always available. Hitachi's 100% data availability guarantee for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family systems ensures that your company meets its information availability requirements. If there is a loss of availability of data caused by a malfunction of the storage system that makes it unable to read or write data, Hitachi will credit your company for the capacity that was unavailable. The architecture is built to protect against single points of failure and protect against disks failures free of charge through intelligent parity groups and additional standby spare disks.
Hitachi doesn't just standby their equipment, they back it by guarantee, and they continue to improve the availability and resiliency of your data through industry-leading local and remote replication capabilities. Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions need intelligent storage systems to store replicas of the data intelligently and efficiently with ease. With the Global Active Device, Hitachi enables full active/active metro-area clustering between data centers that can be up to 500km apart.
The E-series arrays are supported by Hitachi Ops Center Protector, which provides application-aware and space efficient thinly provisioned snapshots using Hitachi Thin Image (HTI), or full volume clones using ShadowImage (SI), copy data management, and instant recovery. You can recover from a data disaster in seconds, not hours! Ops Center Protector is also used to manage remote replication synchronously using GAD, or asynchronously using Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR).
Data can be replicated to a third data center using Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR) software, which offers bi-directional asynchronous replication, to make efficient use of all your investments. HUR utilizes disk-based journals to track changes written to the primary volumes and to protect against the interruption of WAN connectivity between sites. If the WAN link should be interrupted for any reason, replication relationships are maintained and the delta changes that occur during the network interruption are logged in the journals. When the WAN link is restored, only the journaled changes are needed to be replicated to the remote array and applied, with in-order delivery, to get the primary and secondary data copies back in sync. By combining GAD for a local offsite DR copy, with HUR for an out-of-region BC copy, higher levels of availability and data protection can be achieved.
Your system can be monitored in the cloud via Hitachi Remote Ops to predict and prevent downtime proactively. Customers can monitor their storage in the cloud using Hitachi Ops Center Clear Sight, which provides health and capacity monitoring visibility to Hitachi's end users from a web browser.
Storage efficiency
All Hitachi E-Series and 5000-Series now come with Adaptive Data Reduction (ADR). ADR utilizes data compression and data deduplication algorithms to reduce the capacity required to store your data. Hitachi now proudly offers a 2:1 "No Questions Asked" aka NQA, storage efficiency guarantee. Simply put, 2:1 NQA requires no data analysis, no contract for the customer to sign, no requirement to limit the data to known reducible data formats. Put all your data, regardless of its format or origin, on Hitachi storage and Hitachi will guarantee at least 2:1 data reduction! The only requirement is that at least 60 percent of the configured capacity be used so that we can be sure there is enough usage to achieve the 2:1 reduction. If you do not achieve 2:1 reduction, Hitachi will provide extra capacity to make up the difference, or will provide a credit toward a future purchase.
Additionally, for customers who expect higher levels of data reduction, Hitachi offers a 4:1 Data Reduction Guarantee. In order to qualify for the 4:1 data reduction guarantee, the customer must sign a contract stating that they will only store data known to be reducible. The contract stipulates certain data types known to not achieve data reduction, typically data formats that already use reduction methods at the application level, so no further reduction is possible. These include, but are not limited to, formats such as pre-compressed or encrypted databases, images and video, etc. In the event that the customer does not achieve 4:1 data reduction, the Hitachi Global Services Center (GSC) will ask that the customer run some commands to show the types of data being stored and to ascertain the amount of capacity required to make up the difference. This guarantee is available within the first 6 months of the initial purchase of the first storage array.
Management automation
Set up a VSP E-series quickly and manage it, immediately using Hitachi Storage Advisor Embedded (HSA-E) GUI, or Hitachi Ops Center Suite. HAS-E is designed for IT generalists, allowing them to set up and provision storage within 30 minutes of powering up the storage. For customers needing more advanced functionality, the Ops Center Suite provides additional functionality such as in-depth analytical reporting, robust remote replication management, and storage provisioning automation.
HSA-E and Ops Center Suite both use an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) and recommended configuration "best practices" to reduce the time to complete provisioning tasks as well as any diagnostic operations.
Powerful functionality comes bundled with the foundation software package, which includes both HSA-E and Ops Center Suite, which includes administration, local replication, analytics, data mobility, non-disruptive data migration, and SVOS. The advanced software package includes everything in the foundation package plus remote replication, automation, and Global Active Device, to support more demanding service level agreement requirements.