VSP proposal conclusion - (another) storage virtualization solution

Customer Case:- 90% applications on VMware, Currently running on two data center (asynchronous replication) dual controller midrange storage.

Problem:- Primary site storage is full, recent painful outage due to a controller failure and replacement agony in the primary array, limited replication capacity, limited performance, lack of features (thin provisioning, VAAI support, storage tiering). These midrange arrays are first GA in 2007, purchased in 2009 with 5 years support.

Extract from the proposal conclusion:-

Availability (Never goes down):-

• 100% Availability system design specification with minimal component failure impact (6.25% as 16 blades / directors)
• We recommend RAID-6 in order to safeguard our customers with the lowest risk of data loss for large capacity drives (2TB). This is particularly important with large provisioning pools of large capacity drives.
• VSP is Hitachi’s fifth-generation enterprise storage product, proven in the industry for 5 generations of evolution and many mission critical customers across the globe. Hitachi reports strong adoption worldwide with more than 1,400 Virtual Storage Platforms shipped in first 10 months.

Scalability (Future-proof):-

• VSP is cache oriented (scale out to 1024GB cache) compared to the existing **** midrange storage system is disk oriented (max. 16GB cache).
• Primary site VSP can scale out to 2048 internal drives (can scale deep to total 247PB by virtualizing disk oriented arrays), DR site VSP is today diskless virtualizing existing array assets (can scale out to 2048 internal drives).

Simplicity (Ease of Management):-

• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning simplifies provisioning and helps in capacity planning. Recommend pool designs allow storage administrators to keep adding drives into the pools in the future. They can easily provision to host platforms for performance.
• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning transparently spread individual I/O workloads across multiple physical disks to balance workloads, eliminate bottlenecks and reduce costs of managing performance and capacity.
• Hitachi Dynamic Tiering simply eliminates the need for time consuming manual data classification and data movement to significantly improve tiered storage efficiencies.

Investment protection (Latest technology for next 5 years):-

• We propose SAS 2.5’ Small Form Factor drives (tier-1: 146GB, tier-2: 600GB) and SAS 3.5’ drives (tier-3: 2TB).
• The large form factor 2TB 7.2K RPM SAS 3.5 inch disk drive has a significant write performance advantage over the SATA drive. In addition, SAS has dual port redundancy and point to point connectivity which ensures better system availability and fault isolation than SATA.

Feature rich:-

• Unique integration with VMware hypervisor : - A Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, when coupled with VMware VAAI primitives, allows you to build and maintain more scalable and efficient virtual environments. When using the Virtual Storage Platform, the VAAI primitives are extended to external virtualized storage, whether the external storage supports or does not support VAAI. When you use these primitives with the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform’ and Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, you create a robust and highly available infrastructure to support high density virtual machine workloads. DR site diskless VSP enables you to use all VMware storage primitives on your existing midrange disk arrays / capacities.