Hu's Blog

There is a growing need for specialized storage servers to provide functions like Network Attached Storage (NAS) over Internet protocols, Content Archives, enterprise document management, Virtual tape Libraries (VTL), deduplication, low cost modular storage, high availability enterprise storage, etc. While storage servers provide benefits for the management and preservation of certain types of data, it can create storage/server sprawl and increase the fragmentation of data center resources if these services are delivered as standalone storage and server bundles. This tight bundling of storage, server, and server application software limits the scalability of the service and the ability to migrate or refresh the technology without a major disruption to the service it performs. A data center may have a number of these storage servers, each with different management, different protection, and different search tools from different vendors. While some analyst will say that a “one vendor approach” is easier to manage, this is not the case if they need 5 or 6 different products to meet the data centers’ different storage requirements. This piecemeal approach is not viable as the cost for managing and maintaining these disparate products increase with the explosion of data. Hitachi’s answer to this dilemma is an approach that we call “One Platform for all Data.”

One Platform for all Data

This approach separates the storage services from the storage so that these services can be provided through gateways to a common enterprise storage platform. This storage platform can also attach modular storage on the back-end to satisfy the requirement for low cost modular storage without sacrificing the availability and scalability of enterprise storage. The common enterprise platform is the USP V/VM. While we sell our own modular storage on the back-end and our own gateway servers on the front-end, we can support nearly anyone’s Fibre Channel (FC) storage and anyone’s gateway servers that attach through FC. We sell our own high performance Hitachi NAS (HNAS) server powered by BlueArc, our content platform, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), a backup and deduplication platform in Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) which is a partnership with CommVault, and a VTL with FalconStor. We also have customers who have installed gateways from NetApp, Data Domain, Diligent, and others.

Advantages of One Platform for all Data

The advantages of this approach are simplification and scalability. Simplicity comes from having one common management, data protection, and search across a consolidated pool of storage that is virtualized behind a USP V/VM. Simplicity comes from using standard protocols instead of proprietary APIs. Scalability comes from the multiple processors that are tightly coupled through the global cache of the USP V/VM. The Hitachi Content Platform enables content and archive servers to scale to PB by offloading the storage management, data ingestion, indexing and search functions to a common content storage platform.

“One platform all data” enables load balancing across different modalities of data. If you need 10TB of storage, you can probably find 10TB to provision to any of the servers out of the common pool of storage. If you use Dynamic Provisioning, you probably do not need the full 10TB upfront, but can thin provision it with a couple TB to start. In the case of the silo approach, you have to decide where you need the storage. There may be 50TB spread around the different server/storage bundles, but it is not in the right place, so you have to buy an additional 10TB. In most cases, that server/storage bundle will not have thin provisioning, so you would have to allocate the full 10TB even though only 2 or 3TB is actually going to be used initially. All that waste can be eliminated with a “one platform all data” approach.