Hitachi Vantara has added a high performance, all-flash E990 array to the VSP storage line, filling a gap between the high-end 5000 Series and the mid-range F Series.
Brian Householder, president of digital infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, said in a statement: “Our new VSP E990 with Hitachi Ops Center completes our portfolio for midsized enterprises, putting AIOps to work harder for our customers so they can work smarter for theirs.”
Hitachi V’s VSP – Virtual Storage Platform – consists of three tiers.
- Top-end 5000 Series multi-controller, all-flash NVMe and SAS drive arrays with up to 21m IOPS, and down to 70μs latency
- Mid-range dual controller, all-flash F-Series with 600K to 4.8 million IOPS
- Mid-range dual controller, hybrid flash/disk G Series with up to 4.8 million IOPS
The E990 is more powerful than the F Series, and the entry-level 5000 Series – the 5100, with its 4.2 million IOPS. But it slots underneath the 5500 which delivers 21 million IOPS.
E990 hardware and software
The E990 is a dual active:active controller array with an internal PCIe fabric and global cache design, as used in the 5000 Series. Latency is down to 64μs and performance is up to 5.8 million IOPS.
Colin Gallagher, VP for infrastructure product marketing, told us that this was lower than the 5000 because the caching system was global between two controllers – and not four, as with the 5000. Also the system uses hardware-assisted direct memory access and “looks like a multi-controller architecture”.
Raw capacity ranges from 6TB to 1.4PB in the 4U base enclosure. Aways on and adaptive data reduction pumps this up to a guaranteed 4:1 effective capacity. Commodity SSDs are used throughout with 2U expansion cabs to lift capacity to the raw 287PB limit. Available SSDs have 1.9TB, 3.8TB, 7.6TB or 15TB capacities.
The system’s maximum bandwidth is 30GB/sec, which is faster than the 5100’s 25GB/sec. There can be up to 80 x 32 or 16Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and 40 x 10Gbit/s iSCSI (Ethernet) ports.
The system is controlled by Hitachi’s Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) RF, which runs the other VSP arrays.
Hitachi categorises Ops Center as an AIOPs management system. It uses AI and machine learning techniques to simplify system management and provisioning for virtualized and containerised applications.
Like the 5000 Series, the E990 is ready to support storage-class memory and NVMe-over Fabrics, when customers demand. Gallagher said polls of VSP customers indicate little or no demand for either technology at present.
The E990 has a 100 per cent data availability guarantee.
Hitachi EverFlex
Hitachi’s EverFlex offers consumption-based options that range from basic utility pricing through custom outcome-based services to storage-as-a-service.
The company claims the E990 offers the industry’s lowest-cost IOPS – as low as $0.03 per IOPS. That means a 5.8 million IOPS system could cost $174,000.
The VSP E990, Hitachi Ops Center and EverFlex are available globally from Hitachi Vantara and resellers today.
