Technology Insight: Enhancing Continuous Operations and Data Integrity for VMware vSphere Environments

Executive Summary

Hitachi has been in the vanguard of infrastructure solution providers offering large enterprise-scale, storage system virtualization for the last ten years. With the announcement of the VSP G1000, Hitachi added Global Storage Virtualization – the ability to virtualize across metro and remote distances to its virtual storage platform. Hitachi now extends the functionality of these large virtualized storage systems—including Global Storage Virtualization—to a new series of unified storage arrays with the announcement of the next generation Hitachi VSP storage systems. With the announcement of its new series, Hitachi will now offer the same storage capabilities across the VSP family that now spans from entry to high-end storage systems.

Global Storage Virtualization extends virtualized storage services across multiple sites and disparate, heterogeneous physical storage systems under the control of its Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS). A key enabler is the implementation of active-active stretched cluster technology for storage systems that underpins a significant SVOS feature introduced in the VSP G1000—global active device (GAD). We have seen GAD to be of particular value in VMware environments where administrators still hesitate to virtualize critical business applications over a concern for their ability to maintain continuous application availability.

Here we review the highlights of the new models in the VSP family announcement and examine it in the context of using Hitachi’s SVOS-based systems in VMware environments for:

• Non-disruptive Operations for the assurance VMware-based application availability
• Workload Mobility for the movement of VMs and associated applications among SVOS storage platforms
• Non-disruptive Data Migration between storage arrays running SVOS
• Virtualization for Cloud-based IT Services—spanning the enterprise data center and a cloud services provider using large enterprise and modular storage arrays

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