Hitachi, HP Launch Converged Storage Platform

There’s a new converged enterprise storage system available in the market as of 27 September, and both Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi Data Systems are claiming that it’s theirs. There’s no controversy here: They’re both right.

HP and Hitachi both announced a new converged-type storage platform for midrange and larger enterprises.

Hitachi actually builds the hardware and labels a portion of those produced under its own name, the VSP (Virtual Storage Platform); HP buys the rest, puts its own logo on them and services them as if they came out of its own manufacturing facilities.

‘Three-dimensional’ scaling

Turns out HP sells about 60 percent of the lot when both companies come out at the same time with the same product, eWEEK learned.

Hitachi’s Virtual Storage Platform and HP’s XP P9500 disk array both feature storage architecture that not only puts everything under the sun into one box (computing, storage and networking components), but it also scales “three-dimensionally”, Hitachi vice president and chief technology officer Hu Yoshida told eWEEK.

What does “three-dimensional” mean in this context?

“We’re talking about adapting flexibly for performance, capacity and multivendor storage asset utilisation,” Yoshida said. “VSP’s data migration capabilities greatly reduce outage windows. It has page-level [same as so-called ‘chunks’ of data] dynamic tiering that automates the page-based movement of data to the most appropriate storage media to simplify and optimise tier costs and performance.

“Using the new 2.5-inch SAS hard drives, it contains the highest-density storage available today. It also uses 30 percent less power for capacity stored than competitive arrays, so it is a most efficient enterprise storage platform.”

Fast performance

The arrays fit in a standard 19-inch-wide rack and can include solid-state disk drives that are configured alongside the 2.5-inch SAS drives to provide the quick data tiering.

The Hitachi VSP and HP’s P9500 can provide more than 100,000 I/Os per second, HP StorageWorks Research and Development Director Kyle Fitze told eWEEK. The P9000 SmartTiers software automatically moves data to between solid-state disks and the 2.5-inch disk drives based on application performance requirements.

The system can scale from as few as five drives in a single cabinet to as many as 2,000 drives configured across six cabinets, Fitze said.

Fitze, who’s responsible for the company’s Hitachi relationship, told eWEEK that the new arrays have no trouble whatsoever scaling up to manage as many as 5 million objects and 255 petabytes of data – under one management server.

The new Hitachi and HP arrays include native integration – basically plug and play – with VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, which provides full administrative visibility from individual virtual machine to storage logical unit, Yoshida said. This improved control and transparency into the movement and activities of VMs aids in overall protection of large-scale multivendor environments, he said.

Both companies said the arrays are now available. The systems begin at about $250,000 (£158,000).