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SINGLE SYSTEM SUPERHERO: Hitachi VSP E990 conquers the all-flash latency-sensitive demands of growing midrange enterprise consumers

By Angela Romberg posted 04-30-2020 18:33

  


By Angela MaGill, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hitachi Vantara Midrange Storage and Networking Product Portfolios

with Kyle Roblyer, Global Partner Marketing, Brocade Storage Networking division of Broadcom

Someone recently said that when times are tough, we look for superheroes. I started thinking about how as humans we crave something good amid uncertainty or difficulty. It’s one of the reasons I’m excited to share what we’re doing here at Hitachi Vantara to bring more goodness to midrange enterprises battling change and complexities every day as they attempt to grow their businesses.

 

Let me start by introducing the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E990, the latest addition to our All-Flash Portfolio. The VSP E990 was designed to expedite just about everything while keeping simplicity and cost efficiency at the forefront. Good, right?

 

Bridge-range Enterprise Hero

We are seeing a steady uptick in the number of midrange organizations with similar data requirements as our larger enterprise customers: automation, acceleration, and AI/ML functionality for business-critical workloads.

 

The VSP E990 is a hero for what we call “bridge-range” enterprises — bridging midrange needs with enterprise-class credentials in a single system suitable for running the business. The E990 delivers proven Hitachi capabilities (like NVMe and adaptive data reduction or ADR), powerful AI/ML (with Hitachi Ops Center and SVOS) and predictable cost-usage efficiencies and performance.

 

The E990 is built on a strong family pedigree but uniquely conquers the all-flash, latency-sensitive demands of growing midsized enterprise consumers.  Users can quickly leverage E990 for highly responsive, scalable storage with better density, ease and affordability. 

 

 

Dynamic Duos

Before I go deeper into the E990 endowments, it’s a good time to mention the value of collaborating with trusted

partners. Together, we deliver vetted, whole solutions that alleviate our joint customers’ most villainous pain points.

Hitachi Vantara has partnered with Broadcom/BSN to help bridge-range enterprise customers capitalize on their NVMe flash-optimized ecosystems. Kyle Roblyer joins me to crystallize the essential alignments of our respective technologies.

Kyle: Thanks, Angela. The VSP E990 launched around three pillars: Proven, Powerful and Predictable. Those words  epitomize what Brocade Fibre Channel solutions bring to the table. The combination of the E990 with our low latency, NVMe-ready Fibre Channel SAN supercharges performance gains for bridge-rangers.  In this market segment, we expect to see customers pairing the E990 with the Brocade G630 Switch, or even the Brocade X6-4 Director.

Proven

Like any hero, the VSP E990 has to prove its worth. And it does, with world-class infrastructure, our 100% data availability guarantee, and time-tested performance and availability. 

The E990 is loaded with features that matter — ultra-low microsecond latency NVMe (upgrade-ready for FC-NVMe and SCM) to meet real-time demands for data hungry apps; stellar SVOS RF  functionality with support for open systems; and our 4:1 “sight unseen” effective capacity guarantee.

Performance is an important proof point here. We’re delivering best-in-class performance, especially compared to similar storage arrays (HPE, IBM, Dell EMC), with the E990 garnering more than 5.8M IOPS and latency as low as 64µs.

Bridge-range customers can extract highest values per GB for performance. What does it mean that our ADR delivers 4:1 data reduction sight unseen?  The intelligence we’ve designed into our ADR technology means it does not need to review data before reducing it and uses compression and dedupe to minimize the amount of data being stored. Leveraging performance and effective capacity feats, we can actually claim a total efficiency of 7:1. BAM!

Kyle: Performance wins in the digital economy, and this is where Brocade’s best-in-class network infrastructure really hustles. All-flash storage workloads demand maximum network speeds and throughput. We’re seeing a thirst for higher throughputs to maintain agile IT environments, especially across industries that require high-performance, and in depth, real-time analytics. The Fibre Channel protocol was purpose-built to address these unique storage networking demands, and Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel, operating at 32Gbps, is the proven market leader in that space.

Powerful, no cape required

The E990 exudes just the right might to get the job done. Hitachi Ops Center uses innovative AI and ML algorithms to fuel the autonomous data center. Think streamlining app delivery by 90%, reducing 70% of daily tasks and troubleshooting root cause 4 times faster. For E990 customers, it‘s an expedited path to improving decisions and simplifying IT.

Ops Center also rescues self-service from the doldrums with a consumable, cloud-like model and business-friendly templates that orchestrate resource delivery. This is a great way to elevate service levels and integrate with cloud-based workflows from ServiceNow and Amazon.

Being able to automate and future-proof the entire data path is a big deal. And when our customers combine the E990 with Brocade SANnav and Fibre Channel, the results are pervasive automation and intelligence, which are akin to having clairvoyant, subject-matter-expert superpowers.

Kyle: Absolutely. Any time we can solve intensive data storage and networking challenges for our customers is a win-win. Fibre Channel is the most trusted, widely deployed network infrastructure for enterprise storage, with 30 billion transaction a day. Brocade provides Fibre Channel for over 70% of those enterprises for a reason — we’re laser-focused on storage area networking, and we’re improving the standard with each generation. 

We built automation right into our Gen 6 architecture for an arsenal of intelligent must-have tools that mesh really well with Hitachi AI. Through the use of REST API, Python, or Ansible, we enable customers to leverage Brocade Fabric Vision technology to align with Ops Center and SVOS for cohesive operational scale, integrated problem-solving and one-click global visibility — like an omniscient eye across all fabrics and data center environments.

Predictable

As we know, heroes always save the day. The VSP E990 delivers pricing that’s predictable for usage that’s flexible.

Bridge-range customers need an affordable way to match unpredictable business growth, so we offer EverFlex from Hitachi Vantara to shift how to consume IT resources. Pay only for how much you need, when and as you need it, and scale up or down dynamically but pay only for what you use. In this way, customers can align technology spending with usage, to eliminate budget waste as much as 20% and still deliver on predictable SLAs.

And to close the loop on predictability, the E990 delivers blue-chip steady state performance. This means our customers can accurately predict performance, which is particularly critical for latency-sensitive apps. Performance directly impacts the user experience and bottom lines.

Kyle: That’s spot on, Angela. When we’re talking about all-flash landscapes, being able to uphold sustainable, predictable performance is ground zero. Brocade Fibre Channel is a perfect match here, amply capable of predicting and supporting application performance for today’s data center workloads. Upgrading the SAN with the latest Gen 6 (and soon Gen 7) Fibre Channel will ensure compliance with data center service level agreements, warranty and maintenance requirements, as well as providing a platform for predictable performance once customers are ready to move NVMe over Fibre Channel traffic.

Where to go for more goodness

While Kyle and I haven’t run out of good things to talk about, I have run out of blog space. Until we meet again, be sure to download our solution profile for details on readying your digital enterprise for the future or take a look at our storage portfolio infographic to learn more.

Thanks for tuning in!

Angela


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04-25-2022 08:28

Great Write-up