Hitachi With New Flash Controller

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced a multi-phased strategy to incorporate a new flash technology across its portfolio of enterprise and midrange IT solutions.

The company plans to offer a series of integrated flash devices that will be based on a new flash memory management technology developed by Hitachi, Ltd.

Leveraging the new technology, the company’s flash-based products will achieve greater levels of performance, scalability and capacity compared to solid-state products available on the market.

In addition, HDS announced the availability of a flash acceleration feature for its enterprise solution, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), that enables it to achieve more than 1,000,000 random read IOPS. This increase of approximately 3 times the performance of the current VSP allows customers to increase systems consolidation and VM density by up to 100%, defer capital expenses and operating costs, and improve quality of service for open systems and virtualized applications.

"Up to now, the use of flash media to effectively support the demands of high-performance and time-sensitive cloud-based applications has been limited due to flash memory characteristics and controller performance. These conditions have forced customers to make compromises in cost, capacity and resilience," said Roberto Basilio, VP, Infrastructure Platforms Product Management, HDS. "Foreseeing this, Hitachi realized that the best way to incorporate flash media across the entire IT stack was to develop solutions based on original Hitachi intellectual property. This development strategy yields the performance and end-to-end data management capabilities our customers require. The new flash memory controller designed by Hitachi lets us bring to market a series of products designed from the ground up to accelerate computing for big data and mission-critical applications and databases. These uses require real-time processing, enterprise robustness, security and a small environmental footprint."

According to Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, "With this announcement, it’s clear that Hitachi Data Systems is looking to claim a leadership position in driving the use of flash throughout the IT stack. Having direct access to the vast hardware engineering resources of Hitachi clearly offers the potential for competitive advantage and differentiation, while Hitachi Data Systems own evolving software management platforms provide the flexibility to place flash wherever it can maximize performance, reliability and cost effectiveness. Hitachi Data Systems strategy of incorporating flash as a part of end-to-end data management is an obvious difference from, and likely advantage over, many of the point-product flash offerings that are appearing in the market today."

The HDS flash roadmap spans across servers, storage and appliances to enable compute acceleration, caching and performance storage media use cases. The foundation of this strategy is built on the new flash memory controller developed by Hitachi, Ltd. with performance and write endurance.

Advantages of the controller:

• Sustained throughput 4 times greater than current generation SSDs that are based on MLC technology.
• More than 5 years endurance for enterprise workloads.
• Inline zero block compression.
• Secure erase functions.

The new flash memory controller enables flash solutions that accelerate computing for mission-critical applications requiring real-time processing, enterprise robustness, security and a small environmental footprint. These applications include indexing, OLTP databases, decision support, email and VDI.

New Hitachi VSP Flash Acceleration
A milestone in the first phase of the HDS flash technology strategy is the flash acceleration feature available for Hitachi VSP.

This new performance option:

• Raises the scalability limit of VSP by up to 3 times.
• Lowers I/O response time by up to 65%.
• Enhances Hitachi Dynamic Tiering and flash device value.
• On average, enables VSP customers to see 2 times more performance with typical OLTP workloads.

The new flash acceleration feature is enabled non disruptively with a single license key. VSP customers can assess the performance benefits of flash acceleration by contacting their HDS representative to secure a trial license. This feature is available to new customers, as well as to existing VSP customers through a microcode update.

Later this year, HDS will deliver additional efficient, available and resilient flash-optimized solutions. These new solutions will improve customers’ return on flash investments and lower operating expenses when compared to alternative or single-purpose flash products.

What Hu Yoshida has to say about the HDS flash strategy and flash acceleration