HDS Announces VSP

In a move surprising nobody, Hitachi Data Systems finally announced their newest generation of Storage Hardware, the VSP. Why they didn't announce back in April when the majority of launch purchased USP-V's came off their initial maintenance contract is beyond me, but hey, probably a nice gain for EMC.

You see, they took their old name, and changed one of the letters to Virtual, because Virtual is the cool fucking IT buzzword. EMC did the same thing, they changed DMX to VMX, but added an a to make it VMAX. I like to add TO THE EXTREME whenever the EMC sales guys says VMAX.

Getting back to the HDS announcement, they had several key things to announce:
1)Global Cache
2)Eight controller pairs using Intel Processors (minimum config 2)
3)Dynamic Tiering

At this point I'm going to take a break for a second, because those are all strikingly similar to what EMC came out with almost two years ago with the VMAX, the product that HDS corporate bloggers shat all over. Maybe you guys should go back and scrub some of those blogs.

Getting back to the announcement, HDS is moving from 3.5 to 2.5 inch drives. Probably explains why Hitachi is trying to sell its disk business (Also the biggest purchaser of Hitachi hard disk is EMC, a sore spot for HDS). The move to new drive sizes is great, and lets you get a lot more dense. I'd question your power and heat efficiency, EXADATA has issues with heat and power because they cram in the 2.5 inch drives too (I've even heard stories of Comcast killing their EXADATA pilot because of heating/cooling fears).

But being HDS, there are a few things. First off, it's going to be fast. HDS does one thing well: speed. It's a bitch to configure and and a bitch to maintain (Ask a HDS why even NetApp laughs when they hear nonstop scsi), but it's going to be fast. HDS is claiming 2x the read iops and 1.7x times the write iops. It obtains this despite having SATA by heavily leveraging SSD (Something else EMC was early to the table and HDS bloggers shat on...oops?)

Second, its an HDS array, so its going to virtualize 3rd party storage. Now, they did this before, and the announcement makes it seems like it has new special sauce, but most of the fantastic 3rd party support is coming soon (next year if they get it to work) so that the 3rd party stuff has all the features of the VSP. But that will put it in an interesting battle with EMC VPLEX because it too will be getting those features next year

Finally, it looks like they might have fixed a lot of their replication issues, such as true storage based failover. The HDS web site throws out the term active-active, thus proving that even the industry has Companies in it that have no clue what active-active really means.

Ok, I left a finally out. And, for all of the slight snark in my analysis so far, it's big. For a long time, the industry has been moving toward the death of Fiber Channel. EMC would prefer you purchased the VMAX with all ssd/sata, but until FAST v2 they're a bit stuck. On the other hand, Hitachi has just announced their new high end storage without Fiber Channel (queue EMC sales using this to their advantage). It's pretty big, and I applaud them for taking this step.

But in the end, the EMC VMAX has all of the features except virtualization, the EMC VMAX has higher capacity, and has been doing these things for a lot longer. And if you want to try virtualization then VPLEX's retail price is amazingly low. The announcement shows why HDS's market share is shrinking, EMC was shocked by HDS enough in previous announcements to make sure this time, they had the lead in technology. With HP snapping up 3PAR, maybe that out there rumor about DELL trying to get Hitachi to sell HDS may have some merit.