Hu's Blog

In my series on data center transformation I started with Server transformation and the closer integration of server and storage virtualization through the use of VAAI or vStorage APIs for storage arrays.

These APIs were introduced at VMworld in 2008 when VMware announced their vStorage initiatives.

When VMware released these APIs on July 13, 2010, Hitachi jointly released support for these APIs on our AMS 2000 storage arrays. A lot of effort went into this integration as it is a massive technology enhancement for the transformation of the data center. The testing that we have done with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning volumes on an AMS 2300 with VAAI has shown the following results:

• Full copy - 18% performance improvement (speed to copy VM’s)
• Write same - 85% performance improvement (speed to clone VM’s)
• Hardware Assisted Locking - 25% to 35% performance improvement including the removal of SCSI reserves (powering on 1400 VM’s on 4 x Servers simultaneously)

See what VMware CTO Steve Herrod says about these enhancements in his executive blog.

You can see demonstrations of these enhancement and more at VMworld 2010 which is being held this week in San Francisco. Hitachi Data systems will be highlighting the integration of our AMS, USP V/VM, and HNAS line of products with VMware through a number of demonstrations and speaker sessions.

Hitachi has been a VMware partner since 2002 and a Premier Technology Partner (TAP) since that program was started in 2006. Besides being one of the first to implement support for VAAI, we were the first to certify a storage virtualization solution with VMware server virtualization. We are also a large user of VMware with over 1,000 virtual machines on our Hitachi Blade Symphony with 32 Blade servers. We use VMware Site recovery Manager (SRM) to protect more than 6TB of data between our data centers in Indianapolis and Santa Clara.

What’s Being Highlighted at the Show?

Hitachi Data Systems will showcase a wide portfolio of our solutions and expertise at our booth #301:

• VAAI integration on a Blade Symphony and AMS 2300 which we announced in July of 2010
• Demonstration of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager with Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and VM, etc.
• The latest advancements in data protection for VMware environments enabled by vStorgae APIs for Data Protection (VADP) with the Hitachi Data Protection Suite, and Symantec NetBackup
• Integration of Hitachi NAS with VMware vSphere and vCenter with our storage replication adapter (SRA) for VMware SRM and our VSS support.

Speaker Sessions

Session: Using Storage to Efficiently Scale and Manage Enterprise VMware Workloads (Session ID SP9662)

Presenters: Michael Heffernan, global product manager for Server Virtualization, Hitachi Data Systems; Niel B. Harris, vice president of Hosting Services, Apollo Group

Day and Time: Monday, August 30, 3:00pm

Session: Next Generation VM Storage Solutions with VAAI (Session ID TA7121)

Presenters: Michael Heffernan, global product manager for Server Virtualization, Hitachi Data Systems; Lucas Nguyen, senior alliance storage technologist, VMware; Satyam Vaghani, senior staff engineer, VMware

Day and Time: Wednesday, September 1, 10:30am and Thursday, September 2, 3:00pm

Session: Optimizing Storage Performance with vSphere 4.1

Presenter: Michael Heffernan, global product manager for Server Virtualization, Hitachi Data Systems

Day and Time: Thursday, September 2, 12:45pm

(Exhibition Hall Solutions Exchange Theater)

Attend VMworld, visit our demos at Booth #301 and hear our speakers to see how VMworld and Hitachi are working together to transform the data center.