Midrange Storage Platform Comparison Guide

COMPARISON GUIDE
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Midrange Storage Platform Comparison Guide
Choose the Best Midrange Storage Virtualization
Platform for Your Organization
As IT decision-making shifts to line-of-business leaders, application and workload requirements are becoming important
factors in product and vendor selection. IT leaders continue to
influence decisions, but they are more concerned with maintaining operational performance and creating an environment agile
enough to address the growing and evolving business demand
for IT services. The challenge is that many midsized organizations lack the dedicated, highly capable storage resources they
need to balance the complexity of both performance demands
and storage growth. As a result, an infrastructure built around
general-purpose storage systems that are not optimized for
disparate workloads taxes their ability to meet the needs of a
digital business.
COMPARISON GUIDE
For these midsize organizations, flash
storage architectures point the way to the
future. Flash combines much lower latencies, more consistent performance and
far better economies of scale. Midrange
storage systems and traditional enterprise
platforms are consolidating as functional
lines blur. Reliability and availability are critical for organizations of all sizes, but many
struggle with day-to-day uptime. For example, the costs of migration can exceed 50%
of the original storage expense. Storage
platforms that help organizations more
easily migrate to new platforms offer a distinct advantage. Virtualizing storage is a key
tenet of solving this problem, and providing
reusable migration services within software
will pay big dividends.
TABLE 1: COMPARISON OVERVIEW OF MIDRANGE VIRTUALIZED
STORAGE OFFERINGS
Comparison Guide Helps
You Quickly Capitalize on
Emerging Opportunities
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For midsized organizations, achieving bestin-class application delivery with limited
resources remains a challenge. Applications
drive business operations and the supporting infrastructure must ensure competitive
advantage and increased revenue. Midsized
organizations cannot afford extensive
upfront capital and ongoing investment,
while larger organizations are under continual pressure to improve efficiency.
To remain competitive, organizations must
continue to meet their needs for performance, availability and security at an
affordable cost, or risk losing customers.
With a constant need for innovation to stay
ahead of competitors and react to demand,
organizations must simultaneously deal with
greater data volume and extract more value
from the data.
Comparison Overview of
Midrange Virtualized Storage
Platforms
This comparison guide illustrates the
strengths of midrange Hitachi Virtual
Storage Platform (VSP) family systems (VSP
G200, VSP G400, VSP G600 and VSP
G8001) relative to currently available virtual
storage options.
The advantages of the midrange VSP family
include:
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Industry-leading storage virtualization
reduces capital purchases and operating
costs.
Active-active high availability is built in,
requiring no external appliance2.
Hitachi Accelerated Flash ensures transactions are executed with lower service
times.
Data migration is nondisruptive, removing
up to 90% of the effort.
HDS products rank the highest in value
among midrange storage vendors. We
deliver a common feature set from midrange to enterprise offerings, and build in
storage virtualization to extend the life of
existing storage. Hitachi is also the world’s
leader in storage-related patents with more
than 3000 obtained.
Ensure Continuous
Access to Data
GlobalActive
Device
To remain competitive,
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today’s organizations
expect 24/7 availability
and have no tolerance for lost productivity or costs resulting from downtime. The
midrange storage systems of the Hitachi
VSP family ensure continuous availability with the global-active device feature.
This feature allows companies to create
active-active production systems whose
data is used simultaneously by both
Model available after initial release. Ask your HDS representative or partner for more information.
Separately licensed feature available after initial release.
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Unifies block and file workloads with simplified, automated management.
HDS products rank the
highest in value among
midrange storage vendors.
We deliver a common
feature set from midrange
to enterprise offerings,
and build in storage
virtualization to extend the
life of existing storage.
systems. As a built-in feature, global-active
device requires no additional appliance.
For the utmost in data protection, availability, workload mobility and nondisruptive
serviceability, midrange Hitachi VSP family
systems, each with a 100% data availability
guarantee, are the answer.
Reduce Complexity With External
Storage Virtualization
Organizations are turning to technology
solutions to help them reduce complexity
through consolidation, simplified management and reduced costs. External storage
virtualization allows companies to consolidate storage systems from multiple vendors
so they can be centrally managed. This
approach enables organizations to reclaim
lost storage space and add new features,
giving old storage systems greater capabilities to reduce operational expenses and
improve administrative productivity.
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Save Time, Cut Costs and Reduce Risk
With Nondisruptive Data Migration
Data migration can consume 50% or more
of a storage system’s capital expense
budget. That expense is due to the time
and effort involved in safely moving data,
and the risk associated with migration
errors can be costly. Our midrange VSP
family systems allow data to be copied and
moved in the background, with the machine
performing the migration. Thus, the migration does not impact applications and
lowers the requirement for human intervention, reducing time, effort, risks and costs.
This includes third-party storage systems.
Enterprise-Class Flash Accelerates
Application Performance
Accelerating application performance
enables organizations to improve transaction rates for greater efficiency and faster
response time. This means easy access to
information to support analytics and better
decision-making. The patented Hitachi
Accelerated Flash design of the midrange
VSP family systems incorporates high durability, performance and density to improve
response times and consolidate the application environment. With higher density,
organizations can do more in less space
than if the storage system was built with
multiple commodity solid-state drives.
Consolidate File Servers With HighPerformance Hitachi NAS Platform
Many organizations struggle to manage a
growing array of file servers, while other
companies look for ways to improve file
server efficiency. The midrange VSP family
can ease server management challenges
by consolidating file servers. By using the
high-performance Hitachi NAS Platform,
companies gain more efficient capacity
utilization along with the industry’s highest
performance. In fact, we can consolidate,
migrate and deliver better file server performance and capacity efficiency than our
leading competitor.
For the utmost in data
protection, availability,
workload mobility and
nondisruptive serviceability,
midrange Hitachi VSP family
systems, each with a 100%
data availability guarantee,
are the answer.
Data-at-Rest Encryption Supports
Regulatory Compliance
Companies in retail, healthcare and financial industries must comply with mandated
regulations like Payment Card Industry
Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and
others. In addition, many organizations also
require compliance with internal standards
or specific client regulations. The midrange
Hitachi VSP family systems provide built-in
encryption that requires no external appliances or special disk drives and has little or
no impact on performance. The embedded
encryption is very flexible and integrates
with leading key management systems.
Multitenancy Protects Data With RoleBased Access Control
When organizations provide services to
internal or external clients, they need to
isolate these services to protect sensitive
data. They may also need to isolate test
and development environments. To securely
protect data for separate applications,
departments or customers, the VSP family
enables companies to create groups with
role-based access controls, so only specified users can access data in these groups.
Optimize Storage With Automated
Tiering
The ability to tier pools of data allows for
greater capacity efficiency and fine-tuning
of systems for improved performance and
cost savings. The midrange VSP family
systems nondisruptively automate and
optimize tiered storage to position data
according to utilization, including external virtualized storage. The active flash3
capability responds immediately to rapid
changes in workload.
Deliver Consistent Service Levels With a
Common Operating Environment
Organizations that have grown through
mergers, acquisitions and personnel
changes often have different operating
and storage environments that complicate
management and make it difficult to deliver
consistent company-wide
SVOS
services. From midrange
Delivers
to enterprise, Hitachi VSP
Storage ROI
family provides the same
operating environment, so DOWNLOAD
companies can deliver a
common level of services
and those managing services can meet
service level agreements. Proven over
many years in mission-critical enterprise
environments, Hitachi Storage Virtualization
Operating System (SVOS) enables efficient
training and simplified management.
Summary: Reduce
Complexity, Accelerate
Business and Reduce Risks
The midrange Hitachi Virtual Storage
Platform family storage systems help
organizations keep pace with an evolving marketplace and gain a competitive
advantage by simplifying operations,
increasing performance and eliminating
risks. The VSP family’s new management
software improves ease of use, saves time
and reduces complexity, while storage
virtualization consolidates assets, reclaims
space, extends life and reduces migration
efforts. In addition, automated tiering and
orchestration software simplify operations
and drive greater efficiency.
The VSP family delivers best-in-class
performance to accelerate business processes. And with built-in high availability
and enterprise-class data protection with
encryption, the midrange Hitachi VSP
family systems deliver the capabilities
today’s organizations need to keep their
data protected.
Separately licensed feature available after initial release.
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OB-058-A DG April 2015