Ian Clatworthy
Director, Digital Infrastructure Product Solutions Marketing, Hitachi Vantara
October 12, 2021
“Change is the only constant.” Is it possible that Heraclitus anticipated today’s business environment and the demands placed on its IT infrastructure? Maybe not. But catalysts, such as digital transformation, increased dependence on data to achieve business outcomes, and growing interest in hybrid-cloud strategies, confirm his thought. They spur businesses to modernize their digital cores to accommodate change.
Yet, some things remain the same. Contrary to popular perception that everything is moving to the cloud, the data center remains crucial to all organizations. Everything — from powering analytics and AI, to handling transactions at massive scale, to meeting the demand for high performance computing resources for commercial research — requires huge amounts of computational power. Controlling cost while meeting those needs is vital. It is no wonder that 74% of respondents to a 2020 Deloitte study that examined the role of the mainframe said they “believe the mainframe has long-term viability as a strategic platform for their organizations.” For high performance and massive volume at the right price, the mainframe is unbeaten.
Enter the new Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 series. This storage series delivers the resiliency, agility and efficiency to meet the enterprise-scale needs of large businesses looking to secure their futures. The VSP 5000 systems allow CIOs to develop long-term strategic plans that include reinvestment in data centers, to support massive consolidation on premises while simultaneously optimizing the use of cloud resources. The systems also provide significant tactical benefits for storage administrators.
See the News: VSP 5000 Series: The Best Gets Better
Of course, these new platforms bring significant performance increases. They support up to 33 million IOPS (input/output operations per second), a 57% increase over previous generations. Latency as low as 39 microseconds is industry-leading for remarkable application responsiveness. Together, these improvements make extreme consolidation possible, serving up highly performant workloads to the maximum number of simultaneous users.
A newly designed hardware-assisted data reduction card in the platforms provides improved compression performance, taking the load off the storage controller CPUs and maintaining the highest levels of performance. The new VSP 5000 series systems help an enterprise make the most efficient use of its arrays.
But the principles underlying the new VSP 5000 series are more far-reaching than speeds and feeds alone. For example, hardware upgrades have long been the Achilles’ heel of enterprise flexibility. Moving to new storage technology has required massive planning, rip-and-replace methods, and years of effort.
The new VSP 5000 series systems eliminate painful hardware upgrades and difficult migrations. Period.
Now an enterprise can mix storage technologies, including SAS, NVMe, NVMe over fabric, virtualized and cloud storage to provide the optimal balance of performance, capacity and cost across the widest variety of workloads. Of course, storage can scale up, adding drives to an array to increase capacity. But, the VSP 5000 series can also scale out, adding different types of storage to the system as needs change over time.
Regardless of the combination of storage hardware types and communication protocols, a single management system handles all of them. Integrated management makes it possible to fully address the discrete needs of emerging workloads without creating additional storage silos or disrupting existing operations. The result is massive potential for consolidation within the VSP 5000 series systems. And when a yet-to-be-named storage architecture arrives in the future, an enterprise can upgrade without impacting its existing business.
With Hitachi Modern Storage Assurance, enterprises can count on data-in-place, nondisruptive upgrades for efficient, low-impact migration. There is no downtime, no switching off workloads, and no impact on the business when it’s time to move forward. With the new VSP 5000 series, the benefits of future-generation storage architectures are always in reach to support users and enhance operations.
In addition to reducing the complexity of long-term storage planning, the new platforms use AI and machine learning (ML) to enhance real-time monitoring and reporting, and to significantly increase automation. The result is streamlined data management that provides a cloud-like, low-effort experience.
Now an enterprise can have service-level templates that fully automate storage provisioning. When a developer needs resources for a project, they submit a ticket. The platform uses analytics to automatically deliver services, determining the right combination of assets to guarantee the SLA to support the requirement.
Hitachi storage is consistently ranked number one for resiliency. We’ve brought forward features such as our global cache architecture that shifts loads between controllers to keep hosts working under the most demanding scenarios. The addition of AI-powered automation takes resiliency to an even higher level. Remote managers have a deeper, continuous understanding of what is happening within the storage environment. They can be proactive rather than reactive. AI reveals the patterns within the system’s operations, putting them ahead of any challenges.
Being the best at running a business’s day-to-day workloads is only the beginning. Today’s enterprises must also develop and deliver new public cloud apps to help the business pursue opportunities. Typically, that has meant relying on cheap open-source systems installed on the premises. But if that cluster has a problem, time, money and the work may go out the window.
The new VSP 5000 series systems have received full Google Anthos certification. Now an enterprise can do its container-level development on the most reliable platform available. The service level agreements (SLAs), resiliency, agility and simplified management support your business’s innovation.
In addition to near-cloud capabilities, the VSP 5000 series systems will soon fully support public cloud integration. The enterprise can replicate its active data to create virtual data centers that obviate the need to maintain multiple physical data centers. It is now possible to access a VSP as a service, using it to manage Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google or Microsoft Azure capacity.
Has the world changed? Absolutely. The new VSP 5000 series systems transform the enterprise environment. Instead of a monolith, the data center environment is nimble and responsive, supporting the business as it moves toward opportunity. Get the legendary Hitachi Vantara reliability that you trust combined with peak efficiency, resiliency and agility to drive the business forward.
Learn More About Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series
Ian Clatworthy is Global Product Marketing Manager at Hitachi Vantara.
Ian is part of digital Infrastructure marketing leadership at Hitachi Vantara. He has +20 years IT experience, including marketing and pre-sales positions at Dell. Prior to that, he was an IT team leader and customer, working for a team in Formula 1 and traveling the globe.
