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Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Hitachi Unified Storage Consolidates Manage Block, File
and Object Data on a Single Platform
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Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of
Hitachi, today announced the Hitachi Unified Storage
(HUS) platform for the midrange and enterprise markets.
The Hitachi Data Systems strategy for unified management
is to abstract the complexities of the underlying
storage environment to create a service-oriented model
in which organizations manage storage as a service to
their consumers, regardless of the nuances of the
underlying physical devices that serve up the storage.
HUS will be a unified storage platform, meaning that
this will support multiple protocols like FC, iSCSI and
Ethernet (NFS and CIFS) and manage multiple data types
like block, file and object in a single framework. This
platform incorporates the FPGA-based file architecture
that Hitachi acquired from BlueArc last year. This
architecture is based on a single clustered namespace
and an object-based file system that enables fast
searches, fast replication, and automated tiering and
movement of files.
HUS supports object data through an object-based file
system that adds metadata for each file and enables
automated tiering and migration, fast file snapshots and
clones, faster replication over WAN, and fast data
searches. Additionally, Hitachi Unified Storage supports
Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) for an object store with
custom metadata and provides regulatory compliance. HCP
can share HUS capacity with file and block applications
from the same storage pool.
Besides scaling in capacity, HUS also scales by
predictable performance, replicated data, block volume
size and file system size.
There are three models of HUS based on capacity. The HUS
150 has a maximum capacity of 3 petabytes with up to 960
drives. The HUS 130 can hold up to 756TB and the HUS 110
has a maximum capacity of 360TB.
The HUS 110 and 130 block modules are slimmed down to 2U
trays each with a choice of 24 small form factors (SFF)
2.5 inch drives or 12 large form factor (LFF) 3.5 inch
drives. The largest HUS model 150 block module is
housed in a 3U drawer which does not have any internal
disks. Instead of drives, the 150 block module can house
different types of replaceable front-end port modules.
Each model has an option to add a file module for NFS,
CIFS and FTP file sharing access. The file modules can
be installed in single node or clustered configurations.
The difference between the 3 models, 110, 130, and 150
is in the scalability of cache, front end ports, back
end ports, clustered file modules, and number of drives
that it can support. The HUS 150 with a maximum of 20
high density expansion trays can provide 960 drives
across two frames or the width of two data center floor
tiles. With 3TB large capacity SAS drives, this is 2.8PB
of storage system with 32GB of cache, 16 FC front end 8
GB/sec ports and 32 back-end 6GB/sec SAS links.
HUS will be one of the first enterprise storage systems
to utilize the new Multi Level Cell (MLC) 200 and 400GB
SSDs, which will lower the cost per capacity from
previous Single Level Cell (SLC) technology.
In short, the improvement in performance comes from
faster front and back end ports, faster ASICs and
processors, and an improvement in memory management. The
introduction of metadata enhancements will enable an
increase in snapshots to 1024, and improve the
performance of memory dependent features like CoW
snapshots, full capacity replication and dynamic
tiering. The common management tools in Hitachi Command
Suite also support it.
Pricing for the HUS line starts at $22,700. For that, a
buyer gets a box that only handles block-level data, but
that can have a NAS head added to it for future
file-level data use. The starting price for a unified
system with both file- and block-data access is $52,000.
That covers the base hardware, software, installation
and 36 months of software maintenance.
Last but not least, the new Hitachi Application
Protector, also introduced today, is an
application-aware, snapshot-based data protection,
backup and recovery software suite for Microsoft
Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint environments.
Integrated with Hitachi Unified Storage, Hitachi
Application Protector lets administrators for each of
these applications protect their data sets using
familiar interfaces such as Microsoft Management
Console. Application administrators can initiate backup
and recovery jobs. |
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