HPE and Dell EMC get all the attention when it comes to storage, but Hitachi Vantara sure is making a strong declaration with its new all-flash high performance storage system.
The Virtual Storage Platform 5000, known by its codename Project Jupiter, was introduced during the opening keynote of the Hitachi Next 2019 conference, held last week in Las Vegas. Dan McConnell, senior vice president of product management for enterprise infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, declared it the fastest NVMe array on the planet.
It’s not idle boasting, either. At 21 million IOPS, that’s double Dell EMC’s top-of-the-line PowerMax system, which maxes out at 10 million IOPS. And it is massively scalable, able to be configured from two controllers to 12 controllers and over 69 petabytes of capacity. Hitachi is also proclaiming the VSP 5000 can provide eight nines, or 99.999999 percent, availability.
The VSP 5000 series comes with a new dedupe optimizer that uses advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms to perform on-the-fly optimizations of dedupe processes based on block size and other characteristics. This delivers up to 7:1 total reduction.
To do so, Hitachi designed a new architecture, the Hitachi Accelerated Fabric, which utilizes a FPGA-driven acceleration. It uses a combination of low-latency NVMe technologies like flash and SCM (storage class memory).
The VSP 5000 has its own OS, the Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System, which lets customers mix NVMe and SAS flash media in the same system and supports storage technologies including SCM and NVMe over Fabrics.
For on-prem use, it stores data in both block and file formats, supporting a range of workloads from traditional mission-critical business applications to containers to mainframe data.
The VSP 5000 is also cloud-integrated, with the ability to seamlessly tier file and object workloads to the cloud, supporting a variety of cloud-based providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This is done through the VSP Cloud Connect Pack, which comes with a file storage gateway to move data to public clouds.
Hitachi Vantara is the latest to implement AI through an integrated AI engine that gives the VSP 5000 root cause analysis, predictive recommended remediation actions, and AI-assisted resource placement, balancing, and forecasting. The AI comes from Hitachi Ops Center, which is designed to build more autonomous functionality into the infrastructure.
