Dan McConnell
SVP, Product Management, Digital Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara
May 29, 2024
In today's data-driven world, mid-sized businesses face the same storage challenges as large enterprises – managing ever-growing data volumes, ensuring robust security, and achieving sustainability goals. However, unlike their larger counterparts, they often lack the dedicated IT resources to handle complex storage solutions.
Hitachi Vantara understands this challenge. That’s why we’re proud to announce Virtual Storage Platform One Block Storage Appliances, an innovative line of storage appliances specifically designed to address the unique needs of mid-sized businesses. Offering unparalleled simplicity, sustainability, and security in a user-friendly package, Virtual Storage Platform One Block empowers mid-size businesses to manage their data with greater ease and efficiency.
Virtual Storage Platform One takes the complexity out of storage management. These arrays are designed to radically simplify the customer experience, dramatically improve storage sustainability and revolutionize security response. Virtual Storage Platform One brings the same performance, resilience, and security enjoyed by Hitachi Vantara’s largest enterprise customers to the mid-sized enterprise buyer. We understand you don’t have large, dedicated storage teams. Virtual Storage Platform One is built for everyone, without sacrificing the flexibility, performance, or security of the system.
For some customers, deploying a suite of management tools alongside dozens of storage arrays might be the norm. At Hitachi Vantara, we value all our customers, and for those with extensive storage needs, we offer Hitachi Ops Center, a robust federated management solution. However, for a mid-sized enterprise customer purchasing a single storage array to run their business, a suite of tools is simply overkill. Virtual Storage Platform One streamlines storage management. Instead of deploying a suite of management tools, just point your browser to the Virtual Storage Platform One Block Administrator management UI running on dedicated hardware on the controller. We take care of clustering the management interfaces for availability, and Block Administrator gives you all the tools you need for day-to-day management of the array.
Virtual Storage Platform One connects to Hitachi Remote Ops, enabling Hitachi Vantara to monitor the system for proactive support of your environment. We provide access to this data from Clear Sight which gives you a dashboard view of your system(s), providing important data at a glance. For example, it will let you know when microcode should be updated (remotely by us), or when capacity should be expanded. Also, Clear Sight is being continuously updated with new capabilities, including additional array metrics important for your planning.
Further simplifying deployment, Virtual Storage Platform One arrives pre-configured, including the creation of our new (patented) Dynamic Drive Protection (DDP) groups. DDP replaces traditional RAID groups in Virtual Storage Platform One arrays, providing the resilience of RAID6 with distributed spare space and support for an arbitrary number of drives (from 9-32 per group). We will even support adding drives one (or more) at a time. DDP improves the resilience of the box by dramatically lowering rebuild times. Additionally, it simplifies capacity planning, allowing you to buy only what you need. The granular growth the DDP provides also contributes to our sustainability goals because we do not ship and power capacity that isn’t needed.
Simplicity and sustainability go hand-in-hand with Virtual Storage Platform One design as an all-flash, all data reduction platform. Adaptive Data Reduction, our compression and optional deduplication technology, is enabled for all data volumes. Customers have shown that specific compressible workloads do not deduplicate well, so we continue to offer a choice on deduplication. Customers can also choose to add new, patented compression accelerator modules (CAM). The CAMs utilize a new compression algorithm. On these models we support a 4:1 No Questions Asked data reduction guarantee – it can’t get simpler than that. And, with ADR providing 4:1 data reduction and DDP enabling lightning-fast parity rebuilds for high-capacity media, Virtual Storage Platform One can support over 1.8 PB of effective capacity using just the internal 24 drive slots. That’s a real number, achieved with best practices in mind, that translates to a significant sustainability impact for customers with high-capacity requirements. For customers with lower storage needs, Virtual Storage Platform One scales down to a compact 32TB effective capacity while maintaining the exceptional availability characteristics of the box.
Finally, security is paramount. Our large enterprise and government customers have teams of security experts managing encryption key management solutions, scanning systems for vulnerabilities, and writing detailed security requirements into RFPs. At Hitachi Vantara, we have a long history of meeting and exceeding the requirements of these customers.
Virtual Storage Platform One simplifies the implementation and management of security settings ensuring every customer can benefit from robust protection. By default, Virtual Storage Platform One provides FIPS 140-3 lvl 1 data at rest encryption which is automatically enabled from the distribution center for most customers. What does that mean for you? When a drive is removed from the system, e.g., if it fails and is replaced, the data on it is automatically, immediately cryptographically shredded.
If you have a key management server infrastructure, Virtual Storage Platform One Block Administrator provides built-in KMIP functionality. Data-at-Rest Encryption and KMIP for key management work together to provide protection for physical media. Additionally, we automatically harden the network management access to Block Administrator, and we have implemented a hardware root of trust ensuring that microcode updates are cryptographically validated.
No discussion of security today can leave out ransomware. Virtual Storage Platform One simplifies the response to this security threat, too. We support Thin Image Advanced Safe Snap. Safe Snap provides guaranteed snapshot immutability and recoverability at scale. Every volume can have up to 1,024 Safe Snaps taken, and the array supports up to 1 million Safe Snaps. Most block storage vendors offer snapshots, but their performance usually suffers when many snaps are taken. Hitachi Vantara engineered Safe Snap to address the metadata management challenges that cause competitors’ performance problems.
When provided a list of three objectives, engineers usually say “pick two.” With Virtual Storage Platform One, you get it all: Simple, Sustainable, and Secure.
Virtual Storage Platform One empowers mid-sized businesses to achieve their full potential by providing a simple, sustainable, and secure storage solution. This innovative appliance streamlines management, reduces environmental impact, and safeguards critical data – all within a user-friendly platform.
Learn more about how Virtual Storage Platform One Block Storage Appliances can transform your mid-sized business's storage infrastructure.
As head of product management for infrastructure, Dan's passionate about analyzing trends and emerging technologies to meet the needs of global customers. Prior to Hitachi Vantara, he spent 20 years at Dell where he was part of the team responsible for their merger with EMC.
