Last weekend I was on a panel at a CIO summit sponsored by South Asian Technologies, one of our partners in Sri Lanka. While Sri Lanka is a relatively new market for HDS, the level of IT is well advanced, where customers, like banks and telcos, leverage our enterprise VSP storage arrays with virtualization and replication. The subject of the panel was the changing role of the CIO. One of the challenges for CIOs is the flood of new technologies, including virtualization, flash, primary dedupe, unified storage, and converged infrastructures which they must be able to understand in order to choose wisely and deploy to keep their data centers from becoming obsolete. The choices are overwhelming and vendors are compounding the problem with piece meal solutions that don’t play well with others, not even with solutions in the same vendor’s portfolio. This has got to change.
Hitachi Data Systems understands this and has based our strategy on one platform for all data, starting with infrastructure virtualization, progressing to content virtualization, and culminating with information virtualization. This strategy results in one management platform across server and storage, file, block and object, and simplifies the task of implementing new technologies. Virtualization enables a smooth transition between technologies and enables the ability to leverage other vendor products and include them in our management stack.
Today we are announcing three new technology enhancements that support this strategy and simplify the tasks of implementing flash, unified storage with primary dedupe and converged infrastructures for rapid application deployment:
HUS VM All Flash-Optimized System Software with Hitachi Accelerated Flash Storage
This integrates all the enterprise functions of HUS VM with the high performance, durability, and lower cost of the Hitachi Accelerated Flash module that has been such a success on VSP. The microcode in HUS VM has been optimized for flash to provide 500,000 IOPS now and 1,000,000 IOPS this fall. Hitachi Accelerated Flash modules provide 4 times higher performance and 46% lower bit cost than standard SSDs. With a 5U HUS VM controller, and up to 8 x 2U HAF drawers, this could be used as a standalone flash array with the advantage of full enterprise functions like snapshots and replication. HUS VM can provide flash services to applications through FC or ethernet through a unified front end.
Hitachi Unified Storage and Hitachi NAS Platform
Hitachi Unified Storage and Hitachi NAS have been enhanced with new NAS heads, which double capacity and performance with our hybrid-core architecture that blends Intel and FPGA technologies. These new file modules can consolidate multiple NAS filers at a 30% lower TCO in the first year. These NAS heads include a no charge FPGA feature that provides workload aware, primary dedupe that you can set and forget. Primary dedupe can reduce capacity requirements by as much as 90%.
Hitachi UCP Accelerates time to Market
Enhancements include Hitachi UCP Pro for VMware vSphere turnkey pre-configured solution with an orchestration layer integrated with VMware vCenter to view, provision, monitor, upgrade and performance tune the entire, stack including server, storage and networks for rapid deployment of virtual machines. UCP Select is server, storage, and network reference solution, which are pre-validated and pre-certified for deployment of Microsoft Private Cloud (Hyper V), and for Oracle Database Real Application Cluster with predictable performance. UCP select for SAP HANA scale-out solution was recently announced and is one of our best selling converged solutions. These enhancements simplify management functions and improve utilization to cut TCO by up to 30% over a four-year period.
Each of these announcements can stand on their own and provide tangible cost savings while moving the data center into new areas of technologies like flash, unified storage and converged infrastructure, or they can be combined in a rack to leverage the full power of these technologies across IT. With virtualization these solutions can leverage the existing assets in a data center and maximize IT. This will enable CIOs to move their data centers forward without confusion and complexity.
