Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

VSP 5000 series-Hitachi Vantara new generation of high-end storage system, however, it does not follow the law of past product naming, "the reason for using the number 5000 is to show that it is indeed a breakthrough product." So said Akinobu Shimada, vice president of IT platform product management at Hitachi.

High-end storage, which was once thought to have no tomorrow by Gartner, has ushered in a real outbreak this year. From EMC, HPE, Huawei, IBM, and now Hitachi Vantara, the five major players in the high-end storage market collectively unveiled new products this year, and 2019 can be called the year of high-end storage.

The best part of the year of high-end storage belongs to Hitachi Vantara. When the Hitachi Vantara VSP 5000 series handed over a series of amazing data "100% data availability, 21 million IOPS,0.07 millisecond response time", it also announced that high-end storage will enter a new competitive stage: players in the high-end storage market will continue to increase investment, and high-end storage will not disappear in the future, but will be supported by flash memory and cloudy trends. It plays a more important role in the digital transformation of enterprises.

Why high-end storage can be full of vitality

As early as 2016, Gartner's IT Market Clock for Storage report predicted that high-end storage would gradually withdraw from history in the next 2-5 years. In fact, the decline of traditional high-end storage based on HDD or mixed media is inevitable; it is replaced by high-end storage systems based on all-flash memory.

According to the statistics of IDC, all-flash storage will continue to maintain a high growth rate in the next five years. In the Chinese market, IDC predicts a growth rate of about 50 per cent over the next three to five years. Hitachi Vantara's own business performance also reflects that high-end storage is still an area of concern: the high-end storage business has maintained strong growth and made a significant contribution to the company's overall business continued double-digit growth in 2019 and the first half of 2018.

Akinobu Shimada, Vice President, IT platform Product Management, Hitachi

In Hitachi Vantara's view, the reason why high-end storage systems can coruscate vitality, on the one hand, is that its characteristics of high availability, high reliability and high consistency are still valued by users in many industries, including finance, telecommunications, and so on; on the other hand, high-end storage is constantly evolving to adapt to new technological trends such as cloud native and elastic expansion while retaining the original characteristics. Hitachi Vantara said bluntly that the needs of many users for high-end storage are mainly reflected in:

Usability is a top priority. Data availability is the most fundamental of high-end storage, users want the storage system to be free of downtime.

Pursue high performance. With the change of user business, the demand for business processing speed is getting higher and higher, and the pursuit of high-end storage for performance should be endless. For example, in the financial industry, the emergence of mobile payment makes small transactions show geometric growth, followed by the storage system of financial institutions for faster and faster processing speed, higher and higher performance requirements.

High elasticity. Take financial institutions as an example, in the process of accelerating digital transformation, cloud-based native and other related new services emerge in endlessly, and storage is often needed to meet the flexible needs of the business in terms of capacity and performance.

Easy to use. High-end storage needs to be more intelligent and easier for users to use.

In fact, unlike the business of Internet companies, the business attributes of finance, telecommunications and other industries determine that in the process of digital transformation, it will be faced with two environments and situations for a long time: one is a set of traditional business logic accumulated over many years, which is more in line with running on high-end storage, which requires high reliability and stability. The other is that more and more applications based on cloud native technologies such as micro-services and containers are born, and the two environments will not be separated, but will be more and more closely related. Under the background that the two trends adapt and influence each other, high-end storage will undoubtedly be the best data carrier for the connection between the two environments.

VSP 5000 Series brings New answer to High-end Storage

The reason why this year is the year of high-end storage is that the five major manufacturers of high-end storage have come up with extremely excellent new products this year, and have also identified a clearer trend: higher performance, better scalability and flexibility, more intelligence and simplicity. Hitachi Vantara has more than 40 years of research and development experience in the high-end storage field, which can be said to witness the historical development of the high-end storage industry. Now, with the launch of the VSP 5000 series, Hitachi Vantara has also brought its answer to the future of high-end storage.

Akinobu Shimada believes that the VSP 5000 series of high-end storage has set four new standards:

First, faster and better performance, the VSP 5000 Series is now the fastest storage array in the world, with performance of 21 million IOPS, and latency as low as 70us, and with an effective capacity reduction rate of 4:1 and total efficiency (including data compression, deduplication, snapshots and thin mirroring) at 7:1, the VSP 5000 Series performs well enough to meet the demanding needs of a variety of workloads.

Second, with the best scalability in the industry, the VSP 5000 series can scale up to 12 controllers and capacity up to 69PB.

Third, the VSP 5000 Series has the best flexibility and can support five storage media: NVMe SSD, NVMe SCM, SAS HDD, SAS SSD, etc., to meet the needs of different scenarios for storage value, and mature virtualization capabilities are fully compatible with all storage products, realizing depreciation and protecting investment. In addition, VSP 5000 series can support both core business applications in mainframe environment and cloud native applications such as Docker in Internet environment.

Finally, the VSP 5000 series sets a new benchmark in reliability, with equipment reliability up to 8 9s, which is 100 times higher than that of competitors with the same positioning on the market.

The reason why the VSP 5000 series can have such excellent product features can not be separated from the deep accumulation of high-end storage and the accurate grasp of the future needs of users' business by the Hitachi Vantara R & D team. In the VSP 5000 series, there are a number of technologies that play an important role. The first is the innovative HIE node interconnection technology, which realizes physical distribution and centralized management logic, and solves the delay and management complexity caused by cross-node data access, which is also the key technology of VSP 5000 series to achieve 21 million IOPS and 70us latency.

The second is the unified storage of microcode SVOS. From entry-level storage to mid-range storage to high-end storage to today's new generation of VSP 5000 series, Hitachi Vantara unifies the storage operating system, greatly enhances the unified management of storage, enables disaster recovery between the VSP 5000 series and existing Hitachi Vantara storage, greatly optimizes costs, and lays a solid foundation for subsequent software-defined storage products.

In addition, with the addition of a large number of artificial intelligence technology, the storage function is automated and the storage operation and maintenance is intelligent, which makes the storage management more simple and efficient.

Dai Jianping, vice president and general manager of Hitachi Vantara in China, revealed that the VSP 5000 series is mainly aimed at domestic users in finance, telecommunications, high-end manufacturing, medical and other industries. POC testing has been carried out by domestic users, and users' response and evaluation of the VSP 5000 series are very high. "Hitachi Vantara's domestic manufacturing center in China (CMC) is located in Taicang, which is very conducive to the support and service of domestic users."

Hitachi Vantara:SDS will be strong next year.

In addition to the VSP 5000 series, Hitachi Vantara further revealed future plans for the storage product line. Akinobu Shimada said: "next year, Hitachi Vantara will launch two important storage products. The first is the new NVMe midrange storage product, and the other is Hitachi Vantara's software-defined storage product."

According to Akinobu Shimada, the new NVMe midrange storage product planned for next year will be fully optimized for NVMe SSD, achieving high throughput and ultra-low latency, especially for high workload areas; intelligent data reduction with higher performance and capacity efficiency; in addition, the new product will further enhance reliability, ease of use, and data resilience.

Dai Jianping, global vice president and general manager of Hitachi Vantara in China

There is no doubt that the two biggest trends in storage in recent years are Flash + Software-defined Storage (SDS). Software-defined storage is considered to be a good solution to traditional storage problems such as storage silos, storage management complexity and locking, which will completely subvert the traditional storage pattern. After four or five years of development in the software-defined storage market, a large number of storage companies have emerged to participate in the market competition, and even some established storage giants have begun to gradually introduce SDS product options: support users to run SDS products on general hardware, and can connect with traditional storage, do data-level disaster recovery, and achieve unified data access.

In storage, Hitachi Vantara has never been the fastest in terms of new technologies and trends, but it must be one of the companies that think most about technological innovation and market trends, and each product launch is always at the right time. In the face of the general trend of software-defined storage, Hitachi Vantara finally decided to come up with its blockbuster product next year: Hitachi Software-Defined Storage.

According to Akinobu Shimada, the Hitachi Vantara Software-defined Storage product to be launched next year will be the first enterprise-class software-defined storage solution. "Hitachi SDS is compatible with SVOS and can be interfaced with VSP to manage the system automatically and seamlessly." As Hitachi Vantara joins the tide of SDS, except for a few vendors, the mainstream storage vendors in the market have all laid out software-defined storage.

"there will be two main forms of storage in the future: one is software and hardware, and the other is pure software. from a hardware point of view, software-defined storage uses standardized X86, while differentiated hardware + software departments are enterprise-level integrated hardware and software products. in the future, there will be more and more shared components between the two products, and users can flexibly configure and choose according to their actual needs." Akinobu Shimada concluded by saying.

In-depth observation

It is the consistent style of Hitachi Vantara storage to choose the right technology at the right time and put it on the right platform, and it is more appropriate to describe it as "just right". The VSP 5000 series is similar to Hitachi Vantara's previous products, it is not the first to adopt new technologies, but it is always launched when the market is most receptive to new technologies, and innovation based on new technologies is often at the forefront of the industry.

There is no doubt that the launch of the Hitachi VSP 5000 series will certainly push the competition of high-end storage to a new height. At the same time, we also see that a series of new products such as Hitachi Vantara software-defined storage will be launched next year. It can be said that Hitachi Vantara storage products have entered the peak of product update iteration.

Storage is one of the most advantageous areas of Hitachi Vantara. As the company builds more and more perfect products, services and solutions around data, Hitachi Vantara has a more comprehensive perspective on the future development of storage. 2020 will be the year when Hitachi Vantara storage is in full swing, so let's look forward to its performance.

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