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Hitachi Vantara's new VSP 5600 hits 33 million IOPS
Hitachi Vantara launched new VSP 5000 models and added storage options to its E Series. The products may help enable storage consolidation for customers.
Hitachi Vantara has expanded its storage portfolio with new Virtual Storage Platform 5000 models that dramatically speed up throughout and performance and added new storage options to its E-Series platform. The storage vendor, which unveiled the products Tuesday at its digital infrastructure event, also said it wants to help simplify customer storage management.
Hitachi added the Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5600 and 5200 to its enterprise flagship storage platform. The new arrays still have end-to-end NVMe but now provide a 42% improvement in data reduction efficiency, according to Hitachi. The vendor also introduced new features for its 5000 models, including data-in-place upgrades, and new cloud and container integrations to its E Series.
Hitachi executives highlighted the VSP 5600's ability to deliver 33 million IOPS at 39 microseconds of latency during a briefing.
"If you have extremely demanding analytics workloads or mission-critical workloads, you can rest assured that this thing can very easily tackle them and then some," said Radhika Krishnan, chief product officer at Hitachi.
Eric Burgener, an analyst at IDC, agreed that the VSP 5600's performance of 33 million IOPS is "a pretty impressive number," adding that it's the highest throughput he's seen for a single array in the open systems arena.
While the high throughput gives Hitachi some "bragging rights," Burgener said the vendor may also be capitalizing on a recent trend: consolidation. As customers refresh their existing storage infrastructure, they are looking to limit the number of platforms they use and the number of vendors they work with, he said.
"If you're going to take workloads off two or three systems and move them on to one system, you need the performance. You need to make sure that it's got higher availability," Burgener said. "One can make an argument that you can't consolidate workloads any more densely on anything other than this Hitachi system."
Krishnan agreed that the high throughput can be used by customers to consolidate several storage workloads onto one VSP 5600 platform.
"We have what we refer to as 'automatic data reduction technology,'" she said. "If you think of it as application compression, as a very clever patented technology sitting behind it. And what we're now able to deliver as a 42% improvement in that data reduction."
Along with the upgrade in performance, the VSP 5600 comes with a maximum raw internal capacity of 69.3 petabytes, which could manage more customer workloads per array.
Upgrades to VSP E-Series
Hitachi Vantara expanded its midrange VSP E-Series products with upgrades to the E590 and E790, providing new storage options for small to midsize companies.
Instead of all-NVMe, customers can now choose all-NVMe, all-SAS HDDs or a combination of the two media types, thanks to a SAS expansion.
Adding SAS HDDs to the E Series, which can be used to manage cold data, helps customers utilize resources available while reducing storage costs for firms that don't need the speed of all-NVMe flash, according to Burgener.
"The improved flexibility of the platform accommodates different types of workloads more cost-effectively," he said.
Hitachi also announced new integrations for the E Series with Google Anthos and Red Hat OpenShift. The E Series also now has the Hitachi Replication Plug-in for Containers, which enables interoperability with container-based storage, bringing enterprise data services in container environments for stateful storage, according to Hitachi.
"When you think about hybrid cloud in general, a lot of storage that sits on the public cloud tends to be container-based," Krishnan said. "Customers having the ability to bridge back and forth between our VSP arrays and this container storage platform becomes critical."
The integrations may provide E-Series customers an opportunity to consolidate storage platforms, given the broader support of storage media and container plug-ins.
Upgrade-in-place, for free
Also new to the VSP 5000 Series is the Hitachi Modern Storage Assurance, which comes as an option in Hitachi EverFlex infrastructure as a service. It is designed to provide seamless upgrades to future VSP technology and provides data-in-place upgrades. The service was already available to Hitachi's E Series.
"This is a subscription that will allow [Hitachi] to add new technologies to the VSP platform as it becomes available and add support for those technologies," Burgener said.
Customers that subscribe to the IaaS offering will get their next upgrade for free if it happens in the next two to five years.
