In the weeks and months preceding the recent launch of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), we received consistently positive feedback from analysts, industry experts and customers on our efficiency-based design, in particular our advances in power and cooling.   It’s not just hype or “feel good” marketing; sustainability is a Tier 1 requirement.  But not every player is equal.

In fact, the adoption of SAS drives is changing the game and in an interesting article, David Floyer from Wikibon provides a very good comparison of storage systems one would normally consider for Tier 1 in the data center.  Also, the ability to combine multiple types of drives with dynamic tiering allows customers to derive significant “green” and economic benefits.

Please take a look at this summary chart:

Figure 1 – Comparison of Tier 1 Power & Space Costs over 3 years for a Performance Configuration (600GB drives, SAS where available)
Source Wikibon 2010
I think the results say it all…the Hitachi VSP was designed for efficiency at all levels, providing significant advantages in power consumption reductions and density, which is important given the Hitachi VSP packs more capacity per square foot or square meter than competitors.

We worked with TechValidate to poll our customers and I will be sharing some of these results with you on this blog from time to time.  HDS actually just issued a press release about the great return our customers reap from their storage assets and HDS’ unique capabilities.

No big secret, but  customers purchased their USPs to improve performance. Actually 86% of the organizations we surveyed increased their performance by 10 to 25% or more compared to other enterprise storage systems in their prior environment. In a majority of cases (over 50%) performance was the reason for purchasing the platform (source: TechValidate).

According to the survey, customers who purchased USPs found reduced operational costs between 10 and 25% of their storage administration costs  compared to prior environments.  With 2010 IT budgets not getting any looser, being able to do this for customers is huge.

Focusing on our File and Content Services portfolio, the survey also identified that 35% of IT organizations increased their application performance between 20 to 30% after deploying their Hitachi High-performance NAS platform; 52% of IT organizations increased the application performance between 10 and 20 percent after deployment (source: TechValidate).

Stay tuned for more facts on great benefits we bring to the table in future blogs, and how our customers derive significant business advantages from our technology.

Please take this with as light-heartedly as you can — asXIV is really a perfect implementation of ‘storage communism,’ as my colleague often says. His reasoning behind this is that all the customer applications assigned to an XIV are treated equally: hence, the phrase storage communism. The net of this argument is that XIV unfortunately customers have very little flexibility and few options as a system gets loaded up – other than to add another system. Which of course is capitalism given the price points.

In the field we hear that the first thing an XIV sales person does is demonstrate that a double hard drive failure is less probable than the end of the world. This tells you there’s a problem. Let me make it clear: there are no RAID 6 capabilities to protect customers and a double hard drive failure that means bye-bye data. Other possible failures include: a PC failure, or a double drive tray and PC failure, …or single drive failure + single drive tray and PC failure. I am losing track of the permutations. You do the math.

I think it’s also valid to question the XIV’s performance, given that response times are in the 5 millisecond range (yes, five), and limitations when running single threaded workloads. If your apps are in no hurry, then this is the one for you.  In contrast, HDS does a great job with performance, reliability and availability with our Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 product line. We are already delivering enterprise-class features for the midrange.

Also with a maximum usable of 79TB of storage from the XIV, this can become expensive for customers who require more than 79TB or know they’ll outgrow that within a year or two of purchase. Since there are no tiering capabilities, customers would need another system if they grow past 79TB. I know, you must be thinking the same thing — that’s yet another island of storage, and an expensive island at that.

Federated Storage Defined
The folks at Wikibon recently published the following definition of federated storage:

Federated storage is the collection of autonomous storage resources governed by a common management system that provides rules about how data is stored, managed and migrated throughout the storage network. In this definition, storage resources include disk capacity managed by controllers or appliances controlling multiple arrays.

One core requirement implied by this definition is the ability to move application data within this federation without any user disruption whatsoever. The business driver here is that disruptions are very difficult to schedule and require enormous amounts of planning, often as much as six months. You’ll hear more on this topic in a future blog.

Tiered storage addresses this need well today, but it can get even better. While tiering optimizes storage efficiency within an array, when storage must be completely moved to another point of control (e.g. moved to a separate controller or appliance) tiered storage falls short because the move is disruptive to applications (although our technology allows customers to mitigate this significantly, to minutes only in some cases).

How Disruptive is Non-disruptive?
Many vendors will claim they can move data non-disruptively. As a customer you need to carefully read the fine print. For example, IBM’s marketing people will claim you can move data from one SVC to another non-disruptively. The fact is you can do this within an SVC cluster but not across clusters.

EMC is also fond of invoking the term non-disruptive, when really they mean less disruptive. Or in the case of migrations from DMX to V-Max, hugely disruptive– unless you think forklift upgrades are minor events.

The truth is Hitachi Data Systems is the only block-based storage vendor today that can offer federated storage and achieve truly non-disruptive migrations for open systems, even across generations of arrays.

How can Hitachi make this claim?
Hitachi offers High Availability Manager which is a software feature that allows data controlled by one USP V to be replicated/migrated to a completely separate array. Once the migration has been completed, the application can access the new target array with no reliance on the original system. You can decide to “fail over” when you want. One more thing that is actually very important to many customers: we can support asset replacement and retirement of OEM external storage assets without “any” disruption to the customers application.

Please check our video on HDS TV here.

Can EMC do this today? When will EMC be able to deliver truly non-disruptive migrations? Your guess is as good as mine.

As a customer, you have choices:

1. Buy functionalities today that meet your tactical and strategic requirements for federated storage, achieve fast ROI and future-proof investments, or…
2. Buy futures from vendors that have consistently forced you to endure expensive, time consuming and disruptive migrations when there are better options available.

When you think about it in these terms, the choice is pretty obvious.

Why should you care as a customer or prospect? In essence our rendition of dynamic provisioning (some call it “thin provisioning”) simplifies and adds operational agility to the storage administration process. It also lets customers purchase less storage capacity up front, deferring storage capacity upgrades in line with actual business usage. This results in operating costs savings (electricity and floor space) associated with keeping unused disk capacity spinning.

Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software also provides performance improvements through proprietary automatic optimized wide-striping of data across all available disks. Unlike our competitors, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software runs on industry-leading Hitachi storage systems and is integrated with their advanced capabilities.

From a technology and operational standpoint, Dynamic Provisioning software allows storage to be allocated to an application without actually being physically mapped until it is used. This means the software allows storage allocations to exceed the amount of storage physically installed. It also means that the provisioning of storage to an application and the physical addition of storage are decoupled.

Putting a business hat on, you can net it out as a capability that extends the life of existing assets through higher utilization and that fosters major reduction of operations management cost and increased storage provisioning agility.

And remember that you can do all of this on systems that are already best in class…