Christophe's Corner

Based upon the title, you may have been expecting this post to be about national or California politics. Itís tempting, but rather, Iíd like to focus on something positive –the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).†† In particular, I want to cover some important sustainability aspects of our newest platform.

Based upon the title, you may have been expecting this post to be about national or California politics. It’s tempting, but rather, I’d like to focus on something positive –the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). In particular, I want to cover some important sustainability aspects of our newest platform.

It’s about keeping your cool really.  It is well-known that keeping IT equipment at the optimal temperature is an energy-intensive proposition, as it easily can make up 50 percent of a data center’s total energy consumption. And by the way, up to 40 percent of that total energy usage is devoured by data storage.

From the early design phases, the Hitachi VSP was designed for efficiency at all levels. For example, our choice of SAS drives and backend interface (for which our competitors are playing catch-up) are innovations that provide significant advantages in power consumption reductions, as well as in density with the 2.5-inch form factor. Density is also an important aspect to consider because data center space always comes at a price, and the Hitachi VSP can pack more capacity per square foot or square meter than its competitors.

Combine that with the amount of business-critical data that continues to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52 percent, and you quickly realize you just can’t afford systems that:

• Do not have green on their bezel
• Can also be used as warehouse heating units (I am thinking of a roman numeral right now)
• Are not “dense” enough, i.e. end up costing a lot more to operate (power consumption, floor space, lack of dynamic tiering) for large capacities. Just look at the physical spec sheets for a V-Max, for example.

In a nutshell, here’s what we have in the Hitachi VSP — when “S” means “Sustainability”:

• Internal and external storage management
• Automated dynamic tiering
• Front-to-back cooling airflow
• Low power, small form factor disk drives
• High-density packaging
• Low power memory
• Flash-protected cache
• …and it’s Super Eco-product certified

The benefits of efficiency and sustainability by design are very visible, and very tangible:

• More storage efficiency per square foot or square meter with high-density architecture
• Lower power consumption per floor space and per capacity utilized
• More workload efficiency with 3D scaling, automated dynamic tiering, higher IOPS per square foot and end-to-end virtualization
• Greater granularity to ensure that data is in the right place on the right type of storage

For more details, please take a look at this white paper:

http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/hitachi-white-paper-strategies-for-greater-sustainability-in-data-center.pdf

For more details on the VSP:

http://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-virtual-storage-platform.html?WT.ac=us_inside_sp1r1&_p=v

Isn’t this a better topic than politics?