Hitachi Data Systems redefines IT infrastructure performance with new Flash portfolio

As organizations digitize their businesses, the demand for immediate access to information has soared, forcing IT departments to focus on modernizing their core IT infrastructures. As a result, companies large and small are increasingly moving to flash-based technologies to create faster, more responsive IT environments. As they begin their journey to an all-flash infrastructure, many struggle to understand how to move to flash without devastating their IT budgets. To help its customers solve these challenges, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) today announced the first wave of new solutions in an expanded flash portfolio that offers unmatched performance, automation and resiliency that is more cost-effective than legacy, disk-based technology.

The Hitachi flash portfolio now includes a new and expanded lineup of all-flash and hybrid flash arrays, performance optimization software and data analytics capabilities, including: the new all-flash Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) F series, enhanced models of the Hitachi VSP G series, next-generation Hitachi flash modules with inline data compression (FMD DC2) and enhanced Hitachi Automation Director and Hitachi Data Center Analytics tools for improved response times and greater effective capacity.

“IT organizations are transforming core infrastructures to leverage flash more aggressively across an increasing number of workloads. With the best flash solutions for solving today’s IT infrastructure needs and a clear capability to help design flash for use cases of the future, Hitachi is a partner you need on this journey. Hitachi is the only vendor to look holistically at simplifying this process by providing a wide range of platform, software and services offerings that bridge the gap between todays IT and what’s next,” said Joe Ong, Managing Director of Hitachi Data Systems in Singapore.

With Hitachi solutions customers can simplify their IT operations and more readily adopt flash across their entire environment for faster time to market and to gain a competitive edge.

“We continue to experience significant growth with proven Flash solutions from Hitachi Data Systems. The expansion of the Hitachi flash portfolio will allow us to provide the right fit solution ― whether high-performance hybrid array or a high-density, all-flash solution ― to our customers without compromise,” said Darin DeHart, vice president of sales, Edge Solutions.

Hitachi has heavily invested in next-generation flash technologies for years, as represented by the more than 350 flash-related patents held by Hitachi worldwide, more than any other vendor in the industry. Furthermore, Hitachi understands the needs of its customers and has been meeting the demand for flash technology since 2008, as one of the leading suppliers of enterprise flash in the industry, having shipped more than 250PB of total flash capacity and supporting the world’s largest all-flash deployments for critical business applications.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series

New additions to the industry-leading Hitachi VSP family – the VSP F400, F600 and F800 – bring together all-flash storage and the simplicity of built-in automation software with the proven resiliency and performance of Hitachi VSP technology. The VSP F series offers an unparalleled 1.4M IOPS to meet the most demanding application requirements and leverages new FMD DC2 (flash modules) to provide inline, no penalty compression for increased effective capacity that keeps latency < 1ms, even at maximum scale.

The VSP F series is the industry’s most resilient all-flash array and offers the industry’s only 100 percent data availability guarantee. Easy-to-use replication management is included with the F series with optional synchronous and asynchronous replication available for complete data protection. The F series ranges in effective storage capacity from 12.8TB up to 448TB and provides customers with and all-flash solution that works seamlessly with other Hitachi infrastructure products through common management software and rich automation tools not available with niche products.

The Hitachi VSP G series has also been enhanced through leveraging the FMD DC2 for better response times, effective capacity and return on investment.

Second Generation Flash Module Drive with Data Compression (FMD DC2)

Leveraging the new FMD DC2 drives that are the foundation of the VSP F series, the enhanced VSP G series can now deliver improved response times, effective flash capacity and return on investment. The Hitachi FMD DC2 patented design leverages a high speed, parallelized architecture that delivers up to five times more write IOPS and three times more read IOPS than standard solid state drives (SSDs). It also includes robust multi-queuing technology that allows IO to be prioritized over background operations for superior low latency, even under heavy load.

The FMD DC2 is available now in capacities up to 6.4TB and brings with it penalty-free, inline compression.

Enhanced Hitachi Automation Director Software

Through predefined service templates and automated management workflows, Hitachi Automation Director empowers end users with self-service provisioning of flash storage to accelerate, simplify and streamline the deployment of new applications and resources faster.

New Hitachi Data Center Analytics

To reduce the cost and complexity and increase the speed of application deployment, Hitachi Data Center Analytics is the most efficient and scalable analytics software in the industry. It provides customers with the tools to strategically position their flash investments across multi-vendor hardware environments with granular performance monitoring and analysis at scale. Hitachi Data Center Analytics monitors Hitachi and third party storage to identify and resolve ecosystem performance issues and enable more effective capacity planning.

As application usage within customer environments continues to grow, so does the pressure to ensure the availability and performance of these applications. Our experience of delivering transformational IT confirms that a combination of flash storage within a software-defined infrastructure, like the breadth of offerings from our partner Hitachi Data Systems, offers customers the right balance of agility, automation, efficiency, and reliability to help us enable their users and their business,” said Neil Eke, Director, Datacenter and Storage Solutions, Computacenter.