COMPARATIVE GUIDE

ORM VIRTUALIZATION ECONOMICS FLEXIBILITY INNOVATE

D INFORMATION GLOBAL CHANGE INTELLIGENT TECHNOL
SIGHT OPPORTUNITY SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE INTEGRA

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000

Comparative Guide
Choose the Best Storage Virtualization Platform
for Your Enterprise

Primary Comparative guide

helps identify requirements and
accelerate business goals

IT decision-makers face multiple challenges

in managing enterprise storage today. Storage
needs continue to grow and new types of
business-critical applications demand consistent
response times, more scalability and no downtime. Often, todays data centers house infrastructure silos built around specific business
applications or technologies. These data silos
limit IT agility and the ability to meet the new
demands of the business.

Many organizations are turning to storage

virtualization to address the challenges they face in
managing storage and enabling greater IT agility.
But many storage virtualization products dont live
up to the promise, causing IT to spend more time
managing a diverse array of storage products. A
storage virtualization platform that offers mature
virtualization capabilities allows IT to meet todays
challenges with an always-available, agile and
automated foundation for a trusted Continuous
Cloud Infrastructure.
Virtualized storage platforms vary drastically from
company to company, often forcing businesses to
make tradeoffs between cost, performance and
efficiency. We developed this comparative guide to
help IT executives understand the current virtualized storage landscape. By comparing the benefits
of various offerings, you can easily identify a solution that will meet your current and future storage
requirements.

COMPARATIVE GUIDE

Comparative Overview
of Storage Virtualization
Platforms
This Comparative Guide illustrates
the strength of Hitachi Virtual Storage
Platform G1000 (VSP G1000) and Hitachi
Storage Virtualization Operating System
(SVOS) relative to currently available
enterprise storage virtualization platforms.
Based on value, data growth, risk and
innovation, VSP G1000 and SVOS offer
clear IT and business advantages (see
Table 1). You no longer need to compromise between enterprise functionality and
midrange value. The advantages of VSP
G1000 include:

1.9x more drives per chassis to

increase storage density and reduce
energy costs.
50% less administrative effort to save
time and improve productivity.
100% availability guarantee to lower risk
and ensure data availability.
90% less refresh effort to accelerate
innovation and business productivity.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 and Hitachi

Storage Virtualization Operating System deliver enterpriseclass storage virtualization. Together, they help you to
manage more data more efficiently, at higher performance
and service levels with a lower operating cost. 

TABLE 1. OVERVIEW COMPARISON OF ENTERPRISE-CLASS STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION OFFERINGS

Storage Virtualization Offerings

Features

Hitachi Global
Virtualization
Capability

IBM San
Volume
Controller

EMC VMAX
Federated
Tiered Storage

EMC
VPLEX

Reduce operating costs, increase value

Enterprise scalability (block/file performance and connectivity)

Integrated resilient active-active data center support

Single multivendor management interface with local and

remote replication support up to 3 data centers

Low environmental requirement

Increased return on existing assets

Protect quality of service with competing workload

Nondisruptive firmware update without quality of service impact

Self-service nondisruptive technology refresh support with GUI

workflow

Unified file, block and object data

Storage features that extend to external storage with existing

data

File capacity efficiency support without quality of service impact

Reduce risk, maximize availability

Replicated LUN migration support on any type of volume

Discover block and file configurations

Consolidated file and block management dashboard

ACCELERATE innovation and productivity

Plug-and-play virtualization without file system lock-in

Reduce Operating Costs,

Increase Value
The data center of today is expensive to
manage and maintain, and administrative
overhead reduces the value that IT
can deliver to the business. As reliance
on technology for business-critical
applications grows, IT must deliver more
value, support a new breed of applications
at cloud scale, and do so without
increasing budgets.
VSP G1000 and SVOS reduce IT
overhead, simplifiy storage management,
and reach new levels of scalability
throughout the enterprise with global
storage virtualization unmatched by any
vendor. Within a single management
interface, VSP G1000 enables enterprise
scalability through the industrys highest
performance hardware for improved
application response time and improved
connectivity. Without the connectivity
limitations of other vendors storage
virtualization solutions. You can increase
virtual machine density to new levels,
reducing the costs of managing different
storage systems separately.
VSP G1000 gives you cost-saving
efficiency by simplifying your storage management process. Where other vendors
leave you managing multiple systems, VSP
G1000 offers a single solution for managing heterogeneous multivendor storage,
independent of connectivity, location, storage system or vendor. When combined
with remote data replication support, VSP
G1000 allows you to create new storage
system and data center extensibility: You
can provision and manage virtual storage
machines with active-active volumes up to
100km apart1.
Simplified storage management with the
VSP G1000 means that your IT staff can
do less work to maintain interoperability
between technology layers. Business continuity and disaster recovery processes
become more efficient as well, allowing
you to lower costs by having each administrator manage more terabytes of storage.
Furthermore, VSP G1000 lets you reach
new levels of storage consolidation, conserving energy and reducing your data
center footprint. It holds up to 1.9 times
more drives per chassis than competing
solutions. With data center costs reaching as high as US$40,000 per square foot
per year to operate, VSP G1000 delivers

important space savings. By consolidating

file, block and object storage natively on
a single system with VSP G1000, you will
lower your operating expenses and
energy costs.

Increase Return on Existing

Assets
With ever-increasing data growth driven by
factors inside and outside the business,
along with tighter IT budgets, you need
ways to get the most value from your
current storage assets. VSP G1000 and
SVOS maximize your return on your
storage investment. Together, they allow
you to manage and extend the life of your
existing storage and consolidate all of your
data into a single, virtualized platform. With
native quality of service QoS management
and active-active support of VSP G1000,
your storage can handle higher application
and virtual machine density per system
than competing storage platforms.
Many organizations struggle with various
infrastructure silos, creating storage
shortages in 1 silo, while leaving excess
capacity stranded in another. VSP G1000
solves this problem with a platform for
aggregating all file, block and object
storage services, including multivendor
storage resources, into a single pool of
enterprise storage capacity. You can also
improve capacity utilization by integrating
active data, archiving and NAS services
in a single platform, all managed from a
single place. And while competing systems
treat all data equally, VSP G1000 allows
you to prioritize workloads to improve

impact on workload.
Take The
VSP G1000 gives you
First Step.
Build Your
the tools you need to
Future.
make sure that when
DOWNLOAD
upgrades and refreshes
happen, your businesscritical applications arent
impacted. It allows you to refresh your
technology with up to 90% less effort than
competing alternatives. And VSP G1000
provides features like deduplication without
impacting throughput and response time
for your business-critical applications,
ensuring maximum productivity.

Reduce Risk, Maximize

Availability
Not only do you face massive data growth,
but you face an increasingly complex set
of requirements to limit data loss. As reliance on technology to run the business
continues to grow, so do the risks to storage. Outages cause costly downtime and
have a negative impact on your brand.
Outages and data loss can also have
costly legal and compliance ramifications
as well. And as storage architecture has
grown more complex, you need to maintain the integrity of transactions across
many application tiers. With so many
demands, its clear that data protection is
more critical than ever before.
A solid data protection system allows
you to mitigate the risks associated with
a complex storage architecture. You
can deliver better customer service, and
address compliance requirements from
inside and outside the organization.

Innovation is the engine of change, and

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concurrency while maintaining high

storage density. With support for activeactive volumes up to 100km apart, you
can benefit from increased storage density
without additional risk exposure.

VSP G1000 has a proven and trusted

technology track record. It is the only
enterprise platform backed by a 100%
data availability, a guarantee you cant find
with any competing vendor.

Upgrades and refreshes to the storage

system can be difficult, too. Your businesscritical applications need to run with no
disruption, but online firmware upgrades
and storage system refreshes from
other vendors can have a significant

With VSP G1000, data protection is maintained for both local and remote data, a
level of protection competing platforms
cannot offer. As recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives
(RTOs) become shorter, reflecting less

tolerance for data loss, VSP G1000 and

SVOS provide always-on operations. They
offer zero recovery point and time objectives to meet your most demanding data
protection needs.
The unified management dashboard of
VSP G1000 gives you at-a-glance visibility
into the health of your storage throughout
the enterprise. Hitachi Command Suite
provides a common management framework with a unified dashboard view of
block, file and object consumers. Its powerful reporting capabilities simplify service
level agreement (SLA) reporting for storage
across your entire organization.

Accelerate Innovation and

Productivity
Open technology is crucial to the enterprise today. The data center must be as
nimble and as innovative as any other area
within the organization in order to stay
competitive. Information infrastructure limitations stifle innovation and flexibility. VSP
G1000 gives you the freedom to manage
your storage assets, boosting productivity
without impacting response time for your
mission-critical applications. With plug
and play virtualization that manages external storage as internal capacity, SVOS
reduces the overhead needed to allocate
storage for new applications and services,
boosting productivity and agility.

While competing storage systems use proprietary file systems that lock you in to their
storage solution and raise exit barriers,
openness is a key pillar of VSP G1000.
With VSP G1000, you can procure and
manage multi-vendor storage across your
enterprise without adding management
complexity or risking costly vendor lock-in.
In addition, the powerful reporting capabilities of Hitachi Command Suite give you
the information you need to perform effective capacity planning. With VSP G1000,
you can transform your data center into a
center for enterprise innovation.

Summary: Make What You

Do Matter More
When you turn to storage virtualization to
help take control of your operating cost,
you need a trustworthy and scalable storage system to deliver on the full promise
of virtualization. With so many virtualized
storage offerings available, its important
to understand the capabilities that provide the highest value for your unique
requirements.

With Hitachi VSP

G1000, you can transform
your data center into
a center for enterprise
innovation. 

expenses through consolidation. Hitachi

Virtual Storage Platform G1000 provides a
single platform for all your storage needs. It
helps you to improve your return on existing storage assets and scale your storage
to meet your business needs.
VSP G1000 reduces the risk to your
enterprise data with its unique data protection features. And it delivers features like
deduplication without the worry of vendor
lock-in. With SVOS, youll know that with
the most mature storage virtualization
platform in the industry, you can focus less
on managing storage and more on driving
your business.

Hitachi Storage Virtualizaiton Operating

System delivers a trusted storage virtualization platform with features unmatched
in the industry. With a centralized management interface for all your storage, local
and remote, you can manage all your storage more efficiently and lower operating

Separately licensed feature available after initial release. Ask your HDS representative or partner for more information.

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by Hitachi Data Systems Corporation.
BR-10072 MC April 2014