Hitachi Data Systems Unveils Next Gen Storage

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) today introduced a new platform that Hitachi says provides organizations with more intelligent, scalable storage and also prepares them for the next-generation data centers leveraging virtualization and cloud computing. HDS unveiled a new upgrade to its management software that, among other things, can manage more volume of objects and capacity via one management server and offers visibility and correlation of applications, virtual machines and servers and logical storage devices for traditional and virtualized VMware and Microsoft Hyper V environments.

The Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) is what HDS calls a "3D scaling storage platform" because it can "scale up," meaning that processors, connectivity and capacity can be dynamically added in a single unit and there's support for page-level tiering. It can also "scale out," meaning that individual units can be dynamically combined into a single logical system with shared resources, there's multi-tenancy support, and the storage needs of servers can be prioritized and provisioned from a common pool of storage resources. Finally, it can "scale deep," meaning that the platform lets organizations dynamically virtualize new and existing external storage systems, among other things.

In his blog on the HDS web site, Hitachi CTO and VP Hu Yoshida says the 3D architecture lets users, for example, start with a diskless, singe rack, 12 core system for use in a virtualized mid-range application environment and scale up to a 6x rack configuration with 96 cores, 1TB of data cache, and 2048 x 2.5 inch, Serial Attached SCSI drives. From there, the architecture could then scale up to support a large VMware cluster with thousands of virtual machines as well as scale deep to include external storage as lower cost tiers of storage.

The new page-level tiering capability will let organizations break up storage data at the page level, rather than logical unit number (LUN) level, and move them to storage media that best matches the data's requirements. "Now a LUN can span multiple tiers of pages, says Claus Mikkelsen, chief scientist with HDS. "Typically, as databases grow, there is lots of data that hasn't been touched in a long time but must stay in tier one or tier 0 where the fastest drives are, while some pages can drop to the lowest tier. This lets you match data, at granular levels, to a tier of storage," he says.

Other storage vendors also offer automated tiering, including EMC and 3Par. EMC offers FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) for Symmetrix V-Max and other EMC storage systems. Earlier this year, EMC announced a new version of FAST that offers sub-LUN tiering for Celerra and Clarrion (though no word on when Symmetrix would offer the latest version of FAST). "VSP's automated tiering is not all that different from FAST on V-Max, but with VSP it feels more cooked in rather than added on," says Howard Marks, chief scientist at DeepStorage.net and a Network Computing contributor. "The difference is that VSP is not, in the fullness of time, limited to local system drives." In other words, HDS will be able to apply its automated tiering to 3rd-party arrays, although not in the initial release of VSP. It may be a year or more before VSP can apply page-level tiering to competitors' arrays.HDS customer the University of Utah Health Care has already embarked on its data center transformation, and the academic health care system is virtualizing and consolidating its server environment, virtualizing its storage environment and consolidating its data centers into a single new data center that is in the design phase with construction to be completed the end of October 2011, explains Jim Livingston, director of IT. The organization uses VMware and Citrix Xen Server, and about three quarters of its virtual server environment, which includes 600 virtual machines running on 40 physical hosts, are production servers. Applications running in the virtual environment run the gamut: electronic medical records, various clinical and financial applications, business intelligence applications, SQL Server databases, web services, application servers, print servers, monitoring systems, event correlation systems, log aggregation and domain name services.

Livingston and his team plan to implement Hitachi's new VSP because he says it will provide the organization with the capabilities it needs to continue to expand the storage environment.  "We are looking forward to the additional capability in regard to performance and capacity of the new platform.  The new dynamic provisioning will allow us to integrate solid state, SAS, and SATA drives into a single pool.  We are also looking forward to the savings we will achieve in reduced power consumption and reduced cooling requirements," he says.

The new Hitachi Command Suite is a revamp of the company's Storage Command Suite that provides unified management of virtual tiered storage and server environments. It can manage more than five million objects and 255PB of virtualized capacity under one management server, unify management for block, file and content across all Hitachi storage and provide end-to-end visibility and correlation of applications, virtual machines and servers and logical storage devices for traditional and virtualized VMware and Microsoft Hyper V environments, according to company officials.

Among other things, HDS includes a dashboard that shows the status of the application's service level agreement (SLA), actual storage resources being utilized, health of storage assets, and utilization trend lines. Livingston says he likes the improvements in HDS management software. "It brings all the tools together into a single pane or integrated environment that will allow us to more easily manage our environment.  Currently we have separate tools for the various management functions."

A private cloud can play a key role in your disaster recovery strategy. We dig into the storage, LAN, and WAN requirements to build a cloud for DR. That and more--including articles on automated data centers and SaaS Web security--in the new all-digital issue of Network Computing. (Registration required.)