Now Hitachi VSP One Storage could speak Azure: Expanding Hybrid Cloud Options
Azure Local integrated with Hitachi VSP One Block: The Best of Both Worlds
Introduction
Enterprises increasingly rely on hybrid cloud strategies to balance agility with control, compliance, and predictable performance. At Ignite today, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Local’s support of Hitachi VSP One Block alongside Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), giving organizations more flexibility in how they design and scale their infrastructure.
This integration enables:
For IT architects and engineering teams, this means hybrid cloud deployments can evolve without sacrificing existing investments or compliance requirements.
Context & Problem Statement
Hybrid cloud adoption is accelerating, but integrating on-premises workloads with cloud services remains complex. Many enterprises rely on SAN-based storage for mission-critical applications because of its predictable performance, resilience, and compliance features. At the same time, Azure Local brings cloud-native capabilities closer to the edge, enabling organizations to run Azure services on-premises for agility and governance.
The challenge?
Traditional hyperconverged deployments using Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) are optimized for simplicity and scale-out compute, but some workloads—such as high-performance databases, ERP systems, and regulated applications—require additional storage options with guaranteed latency and availability for tiering. Until now, these environments often faced trade-offs:
Enter the integration of Azure Local with Hitachi VSP One Block. This approach eliminates those trade-offs by allowing SAN-based storage to coexist with hyperconverged infrastructure under a unified Azure management plane. The result: enterprises gain choice and flexibility without compromising compliance, performance, or sustainability.
Solution Overview
Azure Local now supports integration (public preview) with Hitachi VSP One Block, enabling organizations to extend their hybrid cloud architecture without disrupting existing investments. This approach provides flexibility for workloads that require SAN-level performance while maintaining the simplicity of hyperconverged infrastructure.
Key Concept:
Azure Local clusters can access external SAN storage through Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI (planned) connections. Hitachi VSP One Block acts as a high-performance storage backend, presenting LUNs as Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) to Azure Local nodes. These volumes coexist with S2D-based storage pools, giving administrators the choice to place workloads where they fit best.
Business & Technical Value
Azure Local now supports Hitachi VSP One Block alongside Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), giving enterprises flexibility to design hybrid environments that meet diverse workload requirements. This integration is about choice and coexistence, not replacement.
Best Practices
Migration: From Anywhere to Azure Hybrid Cloud with Hitachi VSP One Block
Enterprises often need to migrate workloads from existing platforms to a hybrid cloud model without sacrificing performance or advanced storage capabilities such as snapshots, thin provisioning, and high availability.
With Azure Local integrated with Hitachi VSP One Block, this migration becomes straightforward and reliable.
Azure Migrate provides a unified platform for moving infrastructure, databases, and applications to Microsoft Azure, including Azure Local instances. It simplifies discovery, replication, and migration while ensuring data integrity and minimal downtime.
The original diagram above was created by Jumpstart Gems and updated by Hitachi Vantara.
Migration Phases