Hitachi Next Generation VSP Storage Systems in Microsoft Environments
by John Webster
Executive Summary
An increasing number of IT departments have multiple data centers that need to have synchronized operations and application mobility to optimize operations. Active-active stretched cluster technology has become key to global IT operations and business continuance achieving that operational level.
Hitachi is a well-established storage vendor that has been offering enterprise class storage to their customers for many years. They have now taken that enterprise class storage technology to a new level by offering global storage virtualization across its family of storage systems with the announcement of the Hitachi next generation Virtual Storage Platforms. Hitachi now provides the ability to virtualize storage across geographically dispersed clusters using active-active stretched clustering technology for non-disruptive data migration, data mobility and disaster recovery applications.
In earlier research, Evaluator Group noted that VSP systems offer significant performance and capacity scaling from a single controller image that can automatically balance workloads across virtual machine environments. For performance in business-critical Microsoft Hyper-V environments, Hitachi’s symmetric active-active controller technology distributes paths across all controllers, eliminating the risk of application degradation due to thrashing. In addition, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) provides side striping, allowing distribution of load across all storage media and dynamic performance and capacity expansion as storage media are added to disk pools. These are all capabilities expressed in software and built into its Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS).
With the announcement of new VSP systems that run SVOS, Hitachi extends these capabilities to multiple models in the family. For Microsoft application environments, this means Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization and applications now have more mobility, with non-disruptive storage operations and data migration capabilities that span enterprise data centers for cloud-based IT services that maintain continuous application availability with easier manageability (see Business Continuity graphic above). And they now have the flexibility to choose either large or small storage platforms to do this.
Additionally, Hyper-V administrators are now more incentivized to distribute their tier 1 applications and still maintain continuous application availability with easier manageability.
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