The enhancements to the HDS unified storage platform aimed at the enterprise and mid-market also now allow cloud tiering from the appliance itself, and new support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes assists performance in virtualized environments.
Paul Lewis, CTO at Hitachi Data Systems Canada
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has announced enhancements to its Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G series portfolio, the HDS enterprise and mid-market platform for unified storage. The family consists of the VSP G400, VSP G600 and VSP G800 systems
“These improvements provide a much better ability to implement digital transformation,” said Paul Lewis, CTO at Hitachi Data Systems Canada. “They enhance data management capability, and improve agility with improved cloud enablement.”
The enhancements fall into three main buckets: first, two new NAS modules provide full native unified SAN and NAS capability, without the need to use virtualization to accomplish this. Secondly, support for VMware has been enhanced. Third, the G series’ analytics capability has been improved and made predictive.
Data management has been significantly enhanced with the new option to include two high-performance NAS modules in the VSP G400, VSP G600 and VSP G800 systems.
“These modules provide a full unified SAN and NAS implementation with a unified functionality,” Lewis said. “This unified storage capability now includes both block and NAS as part of the single frame within the device, so it operates as unified management. Before you could virtualize them together, but not sit in a single controller environment.”
In addition to providing a single platform, it also provides a smaller one – the form factor is reduced. That’s especially important for mid-market customers and HDS’ channel partners, Lewis noted.
“Making the package smaller through a single unit that implements everything is very significant for the channel,” he said. “It means that they don’t have to buy a separate filer. It means that they have lower power costs, lower space, lower cabling, lower cooling. It’s just better for the mid-market world.”
The release also enhances the VSP G Series’ support for virtualized environments through full support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes. This improves support for software-defined storage, letting customers maximize resources, reduce storage complexity and increase efficiency by having application-specific storage service levels be applied to each VM.
“This provides for much more efficient control of virtual machines than before,” Lewis said.
VMware support has also been enhanced with the ability of Hitachi Virtual Infrastructure Integrator 3.0 to simplify VMbackup, recovery and cloning services for VMware vSphere-based infrastructures.
Cloud management has also been significantly upgraded with HDS’s Data Migrator to the Cloud software feature, that lets customers create automated and intelligent, content-aware data management policies.
“This enables cloud tiering from the storage appliance itself,” Lewis said. “Before, you would have had to have had coded it in or had virtualization in between. Now there is native tiering within the frame to do this.”
The final new piece to the puzzle is the Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor, which brings full predictive, proactive analytics to the VSP family for the first time.
“This is much more comprehensive infrastructure analytics than what we had before,” Lewis stated. “It’s predictive, not just a dashboard to tell you what’s going on. It proactively diagnoses problems, so you now get pre-emptive alerts on things that might be occurring.”
