Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP)

Main articles:

• Virtualization. Classification and applications
• Storage System

2021

VSP E990 Storage Overview

In February 2021, Hitachi presented an overview of the E990 VSP storage. Read more [1]here.

Overview of VSP 5000 Series Capabilities

In February 2021, a review of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 series was released. More details here.

E590 and E790 VSP View

In February 2021, the announcement of two midsize storage models was released entirely on NVMe solid-state memory - Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E590 and Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E790. More details here.

2019: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series Announcement

White Paper: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series

On October 10, 2019, Hitachi Vantara introduced the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 series - an enterprise-class flash drive array optimized to take full advantage of the SAS architecture, NVMe memory modules and Storage Class Memory (SCM). More details here.

2018: Operational software with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities

As data center operations become more complex, operational efficiency may decrease, increasing the risk of downtime or data loss. Hitachi Vantara introduced in the spring of 2018 a complex of operating software with AI capabilities, which includes Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor, Hitachi Automation Director and Hitachi Data Instance Director systems, which allow you to create a more flexible data processing infrastructure.

Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor (HIAA) is an AI-based brain. It provides an accurate understanding of the operation of the data center based on the study of the entire data path. HIAA uses machine learning technologies to better optimize, troubleshoot, and predict data center needs. HIAA has a number of new features, such as:

• Predictive analytics. The AI module determines when to purchase new storage. This improves budget planning efficiency and prevents productivity loss.
• Four times faster root cause analysis. The proprietary AI subsystem analyzes configuration changes throughout the data path, identifying problems, and then, using the heuristic module, offers a solution to them. Integration with Hitachi Automation Director (HAD) allows you to immediately make corrections in accordance with recommended practices.

The HAD system is capable of:

• Integrate with IT Services Management (ITSM), including the ServiceNow platform .
• Leverage advanced integration with REST APIs to configure third-party resources, including storage.
• Receive troubleshooting commands from HIAA.
• Automate the configuration of Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID) data protection to protect customers from data loss or downtime.

These integration capabilities between HIAA, HAD, and HDID are part of Hitachi's massive AI-based operational software initiative to help companies move toward standalone operations. These solutions are already available individually and in conjunction with Hitachi VSP, enabling customers to get all the tools they need to upgrade their data centers.

Data center upgrades begin with a solid foundation that ensures uninterrupted data delivery. It must support diverse workloads and integrate with multiple clouds. The new Hitachi VSP F-Series storage systems, based on Flash memory, as well as the hybrid VSP G-Series Flash systems, support a flexible data-processing infrastructure and ensure 100% availability. Compared to previous VSP models, their performance is 3 times higher, and scalability is 2.5 times higher. This accelerates analytic processing and improves application performance, helping you get the most out of your data faster. Integration with cloud environments and containers allows you to service more workloads and support new types of workloads, and eliminates the problem of disparate data.

2011

VMware vSphere 5 Support

In July 2011, Hitachi Data Systems announced integration with the VMware vSphere 5 platform and cloud infrastructure product suite. This will help customers optimize and scale their IT infrastructures and accelerate cloud deployment. Support for VMware vSphere 5 with the new Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) and Hitachi Adaptive Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 family of systems will enable reliable and high-performance storage arrays to improve the density, flexibility, efficiency, and performance of VMs in VMware vSphere environments. In addition, the Hitachi VSP platform enables customers to extend all VMware vSphere 5 features and benefits to third-party external arrays. This unique opportunity helps further reduce IT costs by protecting investment in customer-available technologies.

The Hitachi VSP platform provides the ability to virtualize external storage, optimizing application performance and reducing IT costs to meet key customer business requirements. Hitachi's unique VSP architecture supports scaling in three dimensions - horizontal, vertical, and deep-scaling - allowing customers to incorporate VMware vSphere 5 into their environment and embrace new features in the environment, including the brand new VMware vSphere Storage API, third-party arrays, which improves the density and scalability of virtual machines and the performance of virtualized applications.

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) software enables organizations to create storage pools that can be used as needed. Creating such pools improves application performance and enables more efficient use of available capacity. Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT) software simplifies storage management, provides predictable performance, and reduces costs in a tiered storage environment. With the industry's highest performance and reliability, Hitachi VSP is the ideal platform for virtualizing Tier 1 applications. Customers can ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of enterprise-class systems with large HDP and HDT pools, as well as the ability to tiered storage on Hitachi VSP drives. By automating, HDT helps optimize storage tiers to meet business needs, making it easier to manage and move data between tiers. HDS integration with VMware vSphere 5 will include:

• VMware File System Support vSphere Storage Virtual Machine File Systems (VMFS): Improves virtual machine scalability and performance by enabling customers to realize all of their benefits with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering.
• Supports over 2 TB allocation per LUN: Supports over 2 TB allocation per LUN for VMFS. Customers seeking to simplify storage environment configuration through HDP and HDT can increase VMFS volume capacity to 60 TB (no disruption), with increased agility and efficiency, and without compromising application performance. This enables you to realize the full benefits of the array by leveraging virtual machines not only for test and development applications, but also for virtualization of Tier 1 applications.
• Support VMware vSphere Storage APIs for array integration: In addition to the existing VAAI feature, which enables data processing to storage arrays to improve the availability of virtual machines and servers, the new version offers additional features that allow you to release finely configured LUNs in the array when you delete a virtual disk and receive a thin configuration pool fill signal. Combining these features and fine-tuning with hardware acceleration in HDS hardware enables customers to integrate more closely with VMware infrastructures and leverage fine-tuning features in the most efficient way.
• VMware vSphere Storage API Support for Storage Information: Platform vSphere 5 includes a new API that provides storage array information to VMware vCenter Server. With the integration of the new API, VMware vSphere 5 has the ability to leverage advanced policy-based storage management and distributed resource management (DRS) capabilities to improve the overall performance of virtual machines and ensure even I/O allocation.
• VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 support: Provides array-based replication (with hardware acceleration), tight integration with virtual machines, and advanced disaster recovery planning and testing and failover capabilities. New data center security capabilities provide greater integration with VM and maximize the replication capabilities offered by Hitachi TrueCopy® and Hitachi Universal Replicator. When used with Hitachi technologies that enable storage virtualization, the capabilities of this software can be extended to third-party arrays, allowing you to create and manage a consistent failover mechanism across the data center.

Full VAAI support

As of July 2011, Hitachi VSP provides full support for VAAI, including the following elements of functionality:

• Full Copy - Enables up to 18% faster cloning of virtual machines and Storage vMotion in storage by enabling arrays to make full copies of data within the array.
• Write Same (Block Zeroing) - Enables up to 85% faster preparation of new virtual machines by eliminating the need to write zeros when formatting and increasing the efficiency of system storage utilization.
• Hardware Assisted Locking (SCSI Reservation Lock) - Enables faster locking and improves virtual machine density and efficiency within 35% by eliminating SCSI drive redundancy conflicts.

2010

Use Cases: Deploying a Virtual Server and Cloud Environment

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform will provide value to companies with high-scale requirements, such as virtualized server environments, as well as companies that require an optimal deployment solution: cloud computing

• Deep integration with leading server platforms, virtualizations such as VMware vSphere Microsoft Hyper-V and to provide end-to-end visibility from a single virtual machine to a storage logical element and protect large-scale heterogeneous environments:
  • Integrate with Hitachi NAS Platform to achieve best-in-class performance and scalability, a single namespace, unprecedented intelligent file and object tiering, and the fastest NFS protocol for virtual machines
  • Ideal foundation for organizations migrating to the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform, which includes servers, storage, and network resources managed as end-to-end business resources to place the right data in the right place at the right time.

Key indicators

As of November 2010, the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Hitachi Command Suite software provide organizations with a robust, dynamic, and open architecture to help reduce TCO in the first year and provide future headroom for data centers. It is complemented by the capabilities of the service department and the network of partners that help reduce operating and capital costs, reduce implementation risks, move to a new environment, and extend the life of existing resources.

Savings achieved:

• Lower TCO by 33 percent in the first year compared to a monolithic architecture
• Reduce storage acquisition costs by 70 percent by leveraging tiered storage, freeing up storage capacity, and dynamically distributing data across storage tiers
• Reduce storage footprint by more than 30 percent over competitive solutions
• Reduce carbon emissions by more than 30 percent compared to competing solutions

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Capabilities

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is a three-dimensional scalable platform that enables organizations to scale horizontally, vertically, and externally dynamically to achieve flexibility and cost savings in virtualized data centers. As of November 2010, the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), combined with the HHitachi Command Suite, provides multi-vendor storage performance, capacity, and virtualization for large enterprises. "

The Virtual Storage Platform is the only architecturally capable three-dimensional scalability to flexibly change the performance, capacity, and utilization of multi-vendor storage. Its data migration capabilities significantly reduce downtime. Dynamic page-level tiering automates page-by-page movement of data to the most appropriate media to simplify and optimize the cost and performance of each tier of storage. The new 2.5 "SAS drives provide the highest storage density to date. By reducing energy consumption by more than 30 percent per storage capacity over competitors, this solution is the most efficient enterprise-class storage solution. Scaling in three dimensions provides high performance and capacity for reliable systems, disaster recovery, and high availability:

• Scale vertically to meet the growing needs of applications and servers:
  • Dynamically scale to achieve nondisruptive performance, capacity, and connectivity
  • Add new, global cache-related resources as needed Scale any system resources, including cache, ports, and drives, nondisruptively as demand grows

• Scale horizontally to support multiple servers with varying load levels:
  • Create a storage system by combining different modules into a single logical system
  • Dynamically allocate storage resources to different host servers on demand from a shared storage pool
  • Adapt to server workloads and needs
  • Performance for open systems and mainframe

• Can scale externally to enhance platform capabilities and value of heterogeneous storage:
  • Integrate multi-vendor external storage into a shared pool with vertical and horizontal scaling
  • Single platform for block data, files, and content with centralized management, data protection, and search
  • Leveraging low-cost external storage to reduce costs
  • Lower operating costs through overall management structure