How to Simplify Management to Improve Storage Performance

Flash storage is the defacto standard for many businesses and government agencies today. The reason? Flash has several benefits. Most important: the fact that it is extremely fast versus spinning hard disk drives. It’s also rewritable and non-volatile.

When it first launched flash was expensive and difficult to integrate with existing storage offerings. However, today, as the price of flash storage continues to drop, implementation continues to increase. As a result, IT expects it to work much like SDD, demanding performance objectives such as 100% application availability, superior data security, resilience, and compliance. They also expect it to integrate with private and hybrid cloud implementations.

Recently, Hitachi Vantara released a game changer in storage – Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 series– that gives enterprises what they are looking for. The VSP platform delivers up to 21 million IOPS, improving low latency throughput even if data surges into the multiple petabytes range. The NVMe-powered cloud platform, which supports both containers and OpenStack, checks all the above must-haves and wants, as well as its new Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) RF for VSP to improve management and boost productivity.

Using VSP 3^rd party storage virtualization, organizations can de-couple storage from the physical world, improving uptime and opening up new possibilities in the data center. Since the Hitachi solution’s flash performance is optimized with a patented flash-aware I/O stack, data access is accelerated, while adaptive inline data reduction increases storage and data efficiency. At the same time, the company’s storage virtualization allows SVOS RF to use third-party all-flash and hybrid arrays as storage capacity, consolidating resources for a higher ROI. This means IT doesn’t have to do a complete rip and replace while still achieving a high-speed front end for slower, less-predictable arrays.

Hitachi Ops Center, in particular, is especially useful in this paradigm because it uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to help customers monitor their entire application data path from VM to storage, allowing for quicker root cause analysis and automated remediation, says Chee Khye Chen, Hitachi Vantara’s APAC Technical Expert and Director.

“We use automation to increase the speed and agility of mundane tasks such as VM and storage provisioning and data migration. This will free up staff to focus on the business instead of the plumbing in the infrastructure,” he explains. Application latency, for instance, can go as low as 70 microseconds while quality of service controls ensure that workload performance is stable.

Finally, SVOS RF for VSP makes it possible for organizations to use two storage arrays that transcend geographical boundaries across data centers to support active-active replication. This opens up new possibilities – and improves uptime, reliability, and resiliency. The result, says Chen, is better performance, fewer headaches for IT, and higher service levels.

“Applications will not be disrupted even in the event of a data center failure because we can failover seamlessly to the other cluster nodes in the second data center,” he says.

To learn more about Hitachi Ops Center and how the VSP 5000 series can improve availability, management, and compliance, click here.