HDS With New Flash Storage Offerings, Servers, Converged Solutions

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) unveiled milestones to help organizations extract meaningful insights from information that will lead to innovation and inspire global action.

Advancements in flash technology, advanced x86 servers and support for OpenStack are the next step in the overarching mission of the Hitachi and HDS Global Office of Technology and Planning (Global OTP) to leverage the engineering and R&D talents of both organizations to deliver proven solutions that address customer challenges.

“The new initiatives we are unveiling today further demonstrate our commitment to fostering a rich entrepreneurial spirit that produces innovative solutions for our customers,” said Akinobu Shimada, GM, IT platform business strategy and planning operation, IT platform division group, information and telecommunication systems company, Hitachi Ltd. “We are excited to bring these innovative flash storage and server technologies to market, and to deliver on our shared goal to elevate the engineering power of these high-performing teams.”

Key deliverables announced include new flash storage developments that build on the HDS flash strategy, an extension of the HDS server and converged solutions offerings, and the company’s election to Gold Membership of the OpenStack Foundation.

Ushering in a New Era of Flash Storage
As part of a multi-phased strategy first announced in August 2012, to incorporate patented Hitachi flash technology across the HDS storage portfolio, the companies are unveiling developments in the flash storage space. These advancements will ease flash deployment, improve return on flash investments, and lower operating expenses compared to alternative solutions or single-purpose flash storage products.

They include:

Expansion of Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage options

• Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) 150 now supports Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage modules, bringing enterprise flash to the midrange storage market.
• 3.2TB Hitachi Accelerated Flash modules, currently supported within Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM) and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).

Continued flash storage performance leadership:

• Availability of flash optimization software for HUS VM, delivering extreme all flash array performance of greater than 1,000,000 IO/s at sub-millisecond response times in a single system. (100% random read, 4K IO)
• Demonstrable performance superiority as illustrated by the recently released results of HUS VM all-flash and Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) configurations in the SPECsfs2008 NFS benchmark. The 2-node configuration set the best-ever published response time of 0.59 milliseconds. The 4-node HNAS system delivered higher NFS operations per second than a comparable all solid-state EMC VNX8000, despite having half as many file servers and 1/8th as many solid-state devices.

The Global OTP will continue to expand on this roadmap in the flash storage market, which includes over 60 patents granted or pending for Hitachi flash devices and software modifications. Further, the Global OTP will foster expansion of HDS and Hitachi R&D activity in flash storage and management. HDS and Hitachi will introduce advancements in flash management, protection and tiering, which will span compute and storage environments.

Hitachi Servers and Converged Solutions
Hitachi is leveraging a 50-year continuous history of mainframe and server technology development to expand its leadership in server products and converged solutions based on the Xeon processor. With a focus on datacenter requirements and a close engineering relationship with Intel, Hitachi has created x86-based servers with higher reliability, greater manageability and better performance than typical ‘commodity’ designs, which provides customers with advantages and more compelling converged solutions.

This announcement includes the availability of:

• New Hitachi High Performance Blades for Hitachi Compute Blade 500 and Compute Blade 2000 Servers: These new server blades protect customer investment and allow them to incrementally add the latest technologies, based on the Xeon E5-2600v2 ‘Ivy Bridge’ processor family. The new blades perform better and reduce power consumption while retaining features, such as hardware-embedded logical partitioning (LPARs) and automated cold-standby failover.
• PCI Expansion Blade for CB500: This IO expansion blade allows CB500 users to combine existing integrated, shared network switches with dedicated PCIe-based HBAs and cards, such as nVidia GRID K2 GPUs for shared virtual desktops (VDI) and server-based flash, which is typically used for acceleration of applications, such as Oracle database and SAP HANA.

OpenStack for the Private Cloud and the Open Software-Defined Data Center
In an effort to realize an open approach to the software-defined data center (SDDC), the Global OTP announced Hitachi and HDS have expanded their support of the OpenStack Foundation. Through a gold-level sponsorship, thy intend to provide customers with the flexibility and options to build integrated, programmatically controllable, scalable and cost-effective private cloud infrastructures that complement the OpenStack partner ecosystem. This expanded partnership reflects the long-standing Hitachi commitment to Open Source that enables and empowers IT organizations to drive innovation and value within their environments.

“Our customers are looking to OpenStack as a way to drive flexibility and choice in their on-premise, private cloud infrastructures,” said Manju Ramanathpura, CTO of intelligent platforms, office of technology and planning, HDS. “We have a long history of being active members of the Open Source community. Our extended commitment to the OpenStack Foundation is strategic to our vision for open innovation, which delivers the flexible and integrated private cloud environments that today’s enterprise customers and service providers require.”

About the Global OTP
First announced in August 2013, and built on a foundation of leadership and expertise from HDS and the IT Platform Division Group (ITPD) of Hitachi, the Global OTP combines the technical expertise and market insight of hundreds of engineers across both companies. The results of these efforts are driving innovations that span a variety of industries and applications, and deliver the critical solutions needed to help IT organizations lower costs, increase performance, and extract greater value from their information.

“The collaboration with Hitachi and the development of the Global OTP empower us to produce technology innovations that are wholly differentiated from our competitors and will speed the delivery of the software-defined data center,” said Michael Hay, VP and chief engineer, HDS. “By tapping the combined engineering talents and expertise of both companies, we are delivering solutions that help our customers innovate with information, improve their businesses, and deal with the mounting challenges of today’s data-driven world.“