Why Hitachi Vantara's VSP E990 caters to the midsized business

The new Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E990, targeting midsized enterprises, rounds out the Hitachi Vantara NVMe portfolio and addresses key concerns of the market segment, said KC Phua, Core Storage and Data Protection Lead, Hitachi Vantara.

Midsized enterprises, defined as those which have US$50 million to just under US$1 billion in revenues, face various data challenges, such as how to manage increasing amounts of data with data storage budgets that are not keeping apace, Phua said. With relatively few IT resources, such businesses also want solutions that area simple to manage, and further want speed and reliability, he added.

“It is in their interest to have (services delivered) fast. They want it to be reliable as well. They struggle with budgets for IT and particularly for data storage. Data sizes are growing, data storage budgets are declining. They have to find a good way to deal with these challenges,” he said.

The new Hitachi Vantara VSP E990, previously codenamed 'Jamaica', caters to mid-sized enterprises, and is positioned between the VSP F900 and VSP 5000 in the VSP lineup. It retains the architecture, performance, and efficiency of existing products while also offering artificial intelligence (AI) for managing operations, and supporting EverFlex for financial flexibility.

Performance

When it comes to speed, the E990 is “easily the fastest” in its class, Phua said. The NVMe technology powering the E990 is more than 10x faster than that of the next-fastest media, SATA-based solid state drives (SSD) for random reads, he pointed out.

The system has been clocked at 6 million input-output operations per second (IOPS) and can return response times of 64 microseconds.

“In future this system will be storage class memory ready, SCM ready so if you want to be faster in future, you can be faster in the future with this platform,” he added.

Flexibility

Deployments are very scalable, Phua said. Businesses can start with 7 or 8 TB, then work up to 16 PB of effective capacity. “That's really a lot. In some of the largest banks of the world we have not seen some of these numbers,” he said, sharing that 1 PB is anticipated to be the most popular capacity for the new system.

Price-wise, EverFlex pricing gives customers a choice in how they want to pay for the E990. Options include outright purchase, leasing, a utility model or as-a-service, Phua said. “(It's) very flexible across the board to fit all budget situations,” he commented.

Simplicity

Management tools packaged with the E990 include tools for analysis, automation and protection. When traffic to an application is slow, The Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer can go beyond the storage to check if something else might be the problem, like the network. “It can predict better what to do next,” Phua said.

“The outcome is that we are able to fix issues 4x faster.”

Size

Mid-sized businesses also want smaller physical footprints, Phua observed. This is why Hitachi Vantara designed the E990 to be cabinet-sized, and no more than 0.6 m tall. “The drives are of very high densities so we can pack more capacity and performance into the form factor that Jamaica has,” he said.

At the same time, the E990 ensures that more data can be saved onto the same amount of capacity. “We are so confident in our technology that we will provide customers with a 4:1 data reduction guarantee. It is not a guidance, it is actually a guarantee,” Phua said.

Compatibility

Mid-sized enterprises also ask about how new systems will work with existing investments. Phua said the E990 supports virtualisation, so that it can connect to ageing assets and extend the benefits of NVMe performance to existing arrays. “We can also help with non-disruptive migration,” he added.

Security and cloud concerns are also covered. The E990 is certified to Federal Information Processing Standard Publication (FIPS) 140-2, a US standard for secure cryptography, for instance. Container integration and tiering to the cloud are supported using existing infrastructure products from Hitachi Vantara.

“(The E990) gives you a lot of predictablility for the data budget that you have,” Phua concluded. “Our midrange customers should be able to sleep tight at night.”

The timing of the launch has been ideal for Asia-Pacific businesses, which have been undergoing technology refreshes, Phua noted. “In China we have seen a lot more data consumption. They're very hungry for performance. Whatever they had in the past is just not fast enough,” he shared.

The flexible pricing has also attracted potential customers. “That is encouraging more of the mid-sized customers that we have never spoken to before to come to Hitachi Vantara and say 'this is very interesting', and now they are evaluating these options,” he said.