HDS High-End RAID With G1000, Up to 2,304 HDDs, 256 SSDs, 192 Flash Modules …

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) announced technology to accelerate customer success with business-defined IT – a closer linking of a company’s business and technology objectives that demands a more responsive IT foundation.

Called a ‘Continuous Cloud Infrastructure‘, this foundation can drive IT efficiency through a responsive, software-rich architecture that can quickly react to changing needs without continual redesign and disruption. A move toward Continuous Cloud Infrastructure ensures customers can build the most available, automated and agile environment for next-generation data centers.

With this goal in mind, Hitachi delivers Hitachi Storage Virtualization OS (SVOS), Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 (VSP G1000), a new version of the Hitachi Command Suite management platform and significant enhancements to its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform converged computing offerings. Together, these technologies provide the foundation of an IT infrastructure that can adapt to continuously changing business needs, without disruption.

“Our customers across industries have told us that to keep up with the frenetic pace of business they are aligning the IT and business functions more closely than ever,” said Brian Householder, COO, HDS. “In order to execute in this business defined world, IT teams are looking to new infrastructure strategies to deploy more continuous, adaptable and scalable infrastructure. Businesses need solutions that don’t require constant and disruptive changes to the technology they support. And that is what we are delivering today.“

Hitachi Storage Virtualization OS: Software-Defined
This OS is a stand-alone software implementation of Hitachi storage virtualization. It provides a common software architecture that will double the useful life of hardware architectures, span the breadth of the HDS infrastructure portfolio and enhance and amplify the benefits of server virtualization. SVOS customers have choice, flexibility and a simplified infrastructure for a future-ready path to the software-defined data center without the complicated layers required by competitive offerings.

As an evolution of the Hitachi enterprise storage OSs, SVOS delivers the flexibility of software-defined architectures with the proven capabilities of Hitachi enterprise storage software. Primary features include flash optimization, storage virtualization, automated tiering, nondisruptive data migration and a new native global active device feature that will provide multi-system and multi-datacenter active-active capabilities without the need for an appliance.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000
The best software is best experienced on the best hardware, so Hitachi is also introducing the G1000, an available system on which customers can natively deploy SVOS. This combination of software and reliable hardware provides customers a rock-solid foundation for mission critical applications in the enterprise.

The system can start small and scale block-storage throughput performance of well over 3 million IO/s, over 48GB/s of usable bandwidth, and NFS ops/s performance of over 1.2 million in unified configurations.

The adaptable G1000 helps companies deploy a single platform for all data, by growing to accommodate a variety of customer needs, including:

• A virtualization controller without internal capacity.
• Unified storage system with up to 8-node Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) clusters.
• The highly available infrastructure for Hitachi Content Platform environments.

This flexibility, along with planned data-in-place upgrades mean customers can plan for a longer useful life of this technology because of its ready adaptation to changing business needs, without the pain and expense of constant technology replacements.

“HDS participates in our journey to deliver safe, high quality care with better, less wasteful means,” said Richard Carter, systems architect, Seattle Children’s Hospital. “We think this new HDS platform will provide a lean, efficient technology solution that demonstrates unrivaled availability and reliability. The increased assurance through automation and reduced human error could allow us to focus on providing the safest, most effective care possible. The streamlined solution could drive lower costs that support our founding promise to care for every child in our region, regardless of their family’s ability to pay.”

Software and Solution Enhancements Simplify Customer Environments

• Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) and Unified Compute Platform Director 3.5: On top of support for VSP G1000 and SVOS, there are new entry-level configurations of UCP for vSphere and increased capabilities in Unified Compute Director, such as server profiling for simplified provisioning and enhanced DR integration.
• Hitachi Command Suite (HCS): The latest version of the Hitachi integrated management platform supports the new global storage virtualization features in SVOS, and offers a common REST API across the platform, as well as an updated, streamlined user interface.

Ecosystem Integration and Solution Readiness
These new technologies come to market with integration across virtualization platforms, databases and a variety of clustering and OSs platforms, and can be quickly adopted to support a variety of workloads.

In particular, collaboration with strategic partners such as Microsoft, SAP and VMware enables SVOS and the VSP G1000 to be certified in key initiatives like Microsoft Private cloud deployments, SAP HANA Tailored Data Center Integration and VMware Software-Defined Data Center technology.

“We are pleased to work with HDS to enable customers to realize the value of the software-defined enterprise,” said Sanjay Katyal, VP, global strategic alliances, VMware, Inc. “HDS UCP with vSphere provides customers with a reliable and efficient enterprise converged infrastructure solution.“

“This is the type of technological breakthrough we have been waiting for,” said Howard Holton, director of IT, Precision Discovery LLC. “This flexibility will potentially save us a considerable amount of money by only upgrading our hardware when needed for the foreseeable future. Additionally, these new capabilities create huge benefits for us and for our customers. We’re able to cut processing time, and return that time, and the related costs, back to our customers. Our customers are able to review data faster, meet their deadlines sooner, and strategize more effectively. We’re enabling them to do things better, which in turn, boosts our competitive edge.”

“As an IT company, we count on the reliability of our state-of-the-art infrastructure solution for our most critical workloads. Being an existing HDS enterprise infrastructure solutions customer, we know that HDS technology perfectly addresses our needs of high data growth along with higher performance by delivering sub-millisecond response times,” said Jitendra Sangharajka, associate VP information systems, Infosys Ltd. “Best of all, it protects our existing investments while seamlessly integrating with our storage architecture without any disruption. As we continue to grow, we are excited about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 – the next gen platform – as it will simplify storage complexity associated with organizational expansion and provide us with the ability to scale while lowering overall TCO.”

“As a public healthcare organisation, Osakidetza manages over 30 hospital facilities, covering over 5 million patients, and our storage needs stand at 2.5PB. We rely on performance of our system and availability of our data to save people’s lives on a daily basis,” said Aritza Iratzagorria, chief production officer, Osakidetza. “Having been a HDS customer for nearly a decade, we have absolute confidence that Hitachi’s storage solutions provide us with the level of reliability and security we need to be a successful healthcare provider. The healthcare industry’s storage requirements have been expanding exponentially over the past few years, with more and more data needing to be recorded in ever-detailed precision. This will only continue to grow. This new solution will certainly bring a competitive advantage to any organisations with rising storage needs – which in today’s marketplace, covers pretty much any company in any industry, not just healthcare.”

“As a growing company in the automotive industry, we require IT solutions that are flexible and have the incredible ability to scale alongside our business expansion. HDS provides us with exactly this – solutions that can scale up, out and deep,” said Christoph Buchstätter, manager data center services, Porsche Informatik Gesellschaft m.b.H. “This gives our storage needs the optimal infrastructure needed to grow in all dimensions, and with the management platform efficiently managing all data types for an agile data center, we can concentrate on expanding the business without worrying about our IT foundations.”

“As a Credit Hire Organisation, the timely access to data is mission-critical and powers the core of our business,” said Raymond Ford, group CTO, Automotive and Insurance Solutions Group plc. “HDS’ solution is unmatched in its ability to cater to this fundamental need – it places the right emphasis on low latency and HA to satisfy the resilience that our demanding applications require. Its ability to automate data placement for higher performance and lower cost, along with the capabilities for non-disruptive migration and host-transparent technology refresh to be executed in days also provides us with a competitive advantage in the marketplace.”

“The nature of our business means that we have very intensive and constantly growing storage and management needs. As such, we were looking for the most intelligent and powerful enterprise storage system in the industry – and we found this in HDS’ storage solutions,” said Antonio Cardone, corporate IT service manager, Acantho S.p.A., a telecommunications company. “Utilizing Hitachi storage technology, we have consolidated our previously disparate storage resources into a single pool of powerful and scalable enterprise storage capacity. Hitachi storage technology helped us to deploy robust and powerful DR solutions for our customers, enabling better RPOs and RTOs.“