Colin Gallagher
Vice President, Digital Infrastructure Product Marketing, Hitachi Vantara
July 20, 2021
Long before the advent of software-defined storage (SDS), the Hitachi storage portfolio embraced storage with an approach that enabled seamless migration, single-pane administration, and adoption of new or, in some cases, better storage technologies. As we expand into SDS with our first new storage family for a decade, Hitachi Virtual Storage Software Block (VSS Block), we leaned on years of experience decoupling physical storage constraints to make sure that the underlying technology adapted to enterprise storage needs.
Our commitment to technical research is unprecedented. For example, Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System RF (SVOS RF) continues to be on the leading edge of storage virtualization, pools, tiering, deduplication or compression, and storage replication technologies. It demonstrates our ability to evaluate an underlying technology and conceptualize its implementation across different industries before bringing it to market.
Similarly, Hitachi’s Polyphase Erasure Coding is another technology that we’ve developed to help enterprises better grapple with growing data center workloads. Consider the underlying technologies that make up Industry 4.0: clouds, distributed apps, containers, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and so forth. Enterprises can unlock the value of their data by pairing these with software-defined distributed storage. But to make sure you pick the right solution that does not leave you stuck with a siloed solution you need a partner with the requisite industry expertise and knowledge of future application needs as you build out your platform.
We have used SVOS RF as part of our block storage portfolio for 20-plus years. To truly understand its robust technology functions, you need only look at the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 series. Among its many traits is the ability to provide eight nines of availability and storage latency, making it second to none. But there is always a need to innovate, especially when your only real competition is yourself. So, what does SVOS RF mean for the block version of Hitachi Virtual Storage Software?
Erasure coding provides an efficient way to rebuild large disks in the event of a failure. While the industry provided many features to curb this problem in traditional RAID systems, the time has come to enhance SVOS RF and include Hitachi Polyphase Erasure Coding and x86 servers in an SDS distributed storage offering.
Many observers have pointed out the shortcomings in our competitors’ implementation of erasure coding. Current implementations of erasure coding are fraught with high CPU resource consumption, network latency due to the distributed I/O, and subpar read and write performance due to the same distributed architecture. There is plenty of evidence that pins erasure coding technology to an archival solution, like object storage or a write once, read many (WORM) architectures.
Hitachi’s Polyphase Erasure Coding features a different approach in how it adapts software data protection. Hitachi carefully evaluated erasure coding through years of research and developed a unique patented approach (US# 10,185,624 B2 and 10,496,479 B2). This approach improved crucial elements of data and parity placement, which efficiently improved latency within Hitachi Polyphase Erasure Coding and lowered storage resource overhead. These necessary enhancements provide a place where your data can be synthesized so you can create more value.
As noted earlier, our strategic Virtual Storage Software family supports all-around performance, data availability, and efficient storage technologies for our customers. And while we cannot divulge the technical details of our intellectual property and road map in this blog, it’s clear that our competitors will be limited in their only use case of erasure coding and siloed workloads.
Opening storage systems to a barrage of workloads and unwinding data silos will streamline your ability to support new workloads and better serve customers. Innovations such as these are not new to Hitachi and Hitachi Polyphase Erasure Coding isn’t the first or the last breakthrough on the horizon.
Hitachi is continuing our legacy as an enterprise storage leader with the inclusion of Hitachi Polyphase Erasure coding into Hitachi SVOS RF powering the block version of Virtual Storage Software. This essential architectural inclusion has one thing in mind: the future value of your data. Hitachi is crushing data barriers from the creation of data to how it is monetized. You deserve a technology partner that has data in its DNA!
Colin Gallagher is Vice President, Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara.
Colin leads product marketing for storage systems and software, and converged/hyper-converged solutions. He has 25-years’ storage marketing and product management and has a passion for telling stories about technical products that help customers solve business challenges.
