Hitachi Vantara has added a new block storage appliance to its VSP One storage platform, expanding its aim in the midrange with a 150% performance increase over previous versions.
By
Adam Armstrong,News Writer
Published: 31 May 2024
Hitachi Vantara refreshed its midrange block storage offerings this week with the launch of its new Virtual Storage Platform One Block appliances.
VSP One Block, which is available in three models, comes with up to 1.8 petabytes of effective capacity per 2U. It can be purchased as a single appliance and scale out by adding 64 more nodes in a single cluster. The block storage offers a 4:1 data compression guarantee, 100% availability and up to a 150% performance improvement compared with previous models, according to the vendor.
The release is the latest addition to Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One, a single hybrid cloud platform introduced in October 2023 to provide a unified view across the vendor's products. Hitachi used to offer more modular versions of storage for many different use cases, but the company has simplified that with VSP, according to Ashish Nadkarni, an analyst at IDC.
"[Hitachi's] operating system is the same across the board," he said, noting similar approaches from Pure Storage and NetApp OnTap, NetApp's unified storage operating system. Hitachi Ventara's recent reorganization shows a renewed focus on delivering core infrastructure such as storage, he added.
"Hitachi has always been considered an underdog when it comes to delivering general storage," Nadkarni said.
Move toward the midmarket
VSP One Block is geared more at the midrange market with a balance of price to performance than other offerings from Hitachi Vantara geared toward mission-critical, ultra-high performance such as the VSP 5600. It's a change for a company more known for its higher-end block storage offerings, according to Steve McDowell, founder and analyst at NAND Research.
Hitachi's bread and butter is mainframe storage, really big storage for transaction processing.
"Hitachi's bread and butter is mainframe storage, really big storage for transaction processing," he said. The shift to the midmarket will open the company up to more competition, such as Dell PowerStore and Pure FlashArray, McDowell added.
Hitachi is setting itself apart from competitors by layering Virtual Storage Platform software over its hardware. Users can get unified boxes that have file, block and object, but Hitachi is taking a different approach.
"Hitachi has an appliance for each, but with the software layer on top, hidden from users," he said. "It's abstracted, so it's a little bit of software-defined storage, but it lives on top of hardware.
Hitachi is also highlighting its sustainability through Dynamic Carbon Reduction technology that automatically reduces energy consumption into an eco-mode when the demand is lower. This, combined with its data reduction leading to lower storage footprints and flash storage, allows for a lower CO2 footprint, according to the vendor.
Having a message around sustainability is table stakes for storage vendors now, Nadkarni said.
"Storage is one of the layers of infrastructure that cannot be switched off," he said.
VSP One Block also features data protection options like Hitachi Thin Image Advanced snapshots for immediate use and always-available copies of production data.
The big performance improvements seen this year from storage players comes from the switch to the latest CPUs, McDowell said. New CPUs mean the hardware now has PCIe 5.0 architecture and DDR5 DRAM.
"Going from the previous-generation hardware to this generation is pretty significant, as it brings two times the speed on the bus," McDowell said. "All-flash runs at bus speed, so doubling the speed of the bus doubles the speed of the storage."
While the vendor did upgrade to new CPUs, it also highlighted its data optimizations -- or better data compression and placement for higher performance and density -- as part of its overall performance improvements.
Hanging around the block
In the last few weeks there have been several block product launches, with rollouts from HPE, Dell, NetApp and on Infinidat. This is more about availability of components than anything else, McDowell said. The same is true for cloud vendors.
"We've seen a lot of new instance types popping up because of CPU availability," he said.
High-performance workloads such as AI and high-performance computing need block storage, as it makes the foundation for many of these workloads, Nadkarni said.
"Block was kind of forgotten because of the focus on object and file the last few years," he said, "but block isn't going anywhere."
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.com.
Dig Deeper on Primary storage devices
Unified storage for AI trend highlighted in Hitachi Vantara shiftsBy: SimonRobinson
(Japanese pronunciation: [çi̥taꜜtɕi]) is a Japanese multinational conglomerate founded in 1910 and headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company is active in a range of industries, including digital systems, power and renewable energy solutions, railway systems, healthcare products, and financial systems.
Vantara refreshed its midrange block storage offerings this week with the launch of its new Virtual Storage Platform One Block appliances. VSP One Block, which is available in three models, comes with up to 1.8 petabytes of effective capacity per 2U.
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Hitachi Vantara's primary block storage solutions are designed for seamless integration with cloud environments, enabling businesses to extend their storage capabilities from the data center to the cloud and adopt hybrid or multi-cloud strategies.
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E1090 provides impressive capacity, better performance, and enterprise-class capabilities and resilience, along with the ease of use and price point you need to keep IT aligned with evolving business objectives.
Hitachi Unified Storage is an evolution in uni- versally managing file, block and object data at the midrange level, without compromising performance, scalability or cost efficiency. Unified and Virtualized: One. Platform for All Data Types.
The VSP 5000 Series delivers superior application performance, and AI-optimized operations. Our 100% data availability guarantee ensures that your company meets information availability requirements. Flexibly scale up and out to 33M IOPS and 69PB of capacity with latency as low as 39 microseconds.
Hitachi Vantara platform solutions are designed to work seamlessly in hybrid cloud environments, providing a blueprint for building your data infrastructure for business growth while addressing a wide variety of business application workloads.
Primary storage is directly accessible by the CPU, is volatile, and has a smaller capacity. Secondary storage is not directly accessible by the CPU, is non-volatile, and has a larger capacity. In terms of speed, primary storage is faster than secondary storage.
Some of the key advantages within this design are: Storage for performance and availability-critical workloads: The VSP 5600 model offers a 42 percent improvement in data reduction efficiency, increasing more usable capacity.
A virtual storage portal (VSP) is a Web application that enables end users and organizations to edit, view and manage the storage rented from a cloud storage provider, and allows users to manage and forecast their storage resources, considering the storage infrastructure in use.
Improved efficiency: Getting faster storage with better capacity utilization is the biggest benefit. It also provides more stability to data access and processing. In addition, virtual storage ensures 100% utilization and little chance of running out of capacity.
Magnetic tape has been a core data storage component for decades, used primarily for large-scale data backups and archiving today. That staying power comes from its high capacity, low cost per megabit, and durability under optimal conditions.
Today, midrange systems include servers used in industrial process-control and manufacturing plants and play major roles in computer-aided manufacturing (CAM).
The command device accepts commands from the host and executes them on the storage system. The command device is a dedicated logical volume. Hitachi Open Remote Copy Manager (HORCM) The HORCM is located in the CCI server.
(Japanese pronunciation: [çi̥taꜜtɕi]) is a Japanese multinational conglomerate founded in 1910 and headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company is active in a range of industries, including digital systems, power and renewable energy solutions, railway systems, healthcare products, and financial systems.
The Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS), powered by Commvault, is a modern and unified solution that facilitates the backup, recovery, and management of enterprise and application data.
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