Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Reviews

We are a partner with Hitachi, offering our customers a range of storage solutions, from midrange to enterprise, including products like VSP e590 and VSP e790. Additionally, we have recommended the VSP 5600 and VSP 5200 series to certain customers. All of these VSPs are deployed on-premises.

Our customers utilize the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform in their production environments, and several major banks in Pakistan employ this storage solution for their banking production software.

We don't encounter any challenges in selling these Hitachi VSPs to our customers. These products boast an exceptionally robust architecture, making them highly reliable. This reliability is the key reason behind our lack of challenges. However, when we delve into the realm of competition, particularly in the unified storage sector, we do face certain challenges. This is primarily due to the usage of gateways in their storage solutions by some competitors. Unlike other competitors such as NetApp and Huawei, who do not employ gateways, we contend with challenges related to these gateways within the context of unified products.

Many customers have been utilizing Hitachi Vantara for several years, relying on its storage capabilities. They appreciate its reliable roadmaps, which facilitate long-term planning. This makes it an effortless choice for customers to opt for Hitachi Vantara, as the product seamlessly accommodates updates and future changes.

The key focal point of the Hitachi Vantara roadmap for our clients is centered around future upgrades. Typically, customers undergo tech refresh cycles approximately every five years. Consequently, when they embark on a tech refresh initiative, they tend to prioritize options that facilitate a smooth transition of data to alternative storage solutions. In this context, Hitachi Vantara leverages its external storage virtualization platform to ensure a seamless data migration process. This approach proves to be highly advantageous for our customers, and it stands as a primary reason for their choice to engage with Hitachi Vantara's offerings.

Our customers are highly satisfied with their choice to acquire Hitachi products and services. I have not observed any of our customers shifting away from the Hitachi brand.

I would recommend Hitachi Vantara 100 percent of the time to others.

There are tools that assist us in accessing the IOPS per second and latencies of Hitachi Vantara systems. One such tool is the CPK tool, accessible through the Hitachi Vantara portal. Whenever we configure a product and a customer requests information about the IOPS and latencies, we can provide them with a report from the portal. This report includes details about reads, writes, IOPS, and sequential operations, offering a comprehensive overview of the IOPS performance that Hitachi Vantara offers.

The combination of low latency and high performance has consistently assisted customers in improving their production and enhancing their working experience. It also aids them in easily managing the product, giving them time to expand their knowledge and plan for the future, rather than dealing with storage-related issues.

The cost comparison of IOPS between our solutions and those of competitors is favorable at present, but this wasn't always the case. In the Pakistani market, Huawei used to be highly competitive. However, our current partnership with Hitachi has allowed us to pose a strong challenge to Huawei. Additionally, when considering products from NetApp, EMC, and even IBM, Hitachi remains highly competitive.

Hitachi offers flexible media options to support the consolidation of multiple uses within the same platform which is important to our customers. Most of our customers utilize Unified Storage, employing a two-tier storage approach that includes both NVMe and SSDs. However, current trends indicate a shift in customer preferences towards NVMe over SAAS or SSDs due to the heightened reliability and increased cost-effectiveness of NVMe technology. This transition is driving many customers to adopt a comprehensive NVMe solution. Nonetheless, a substantial number of large customers still adhere to the two-tier storage model. For their primary tier, they employ NVMe drives, while for the secondary tier, they opt for NFS drives or a SAAS-based large-scale service.

The integration of various use cases into a unified platform to facilitate the transformation of data into business insights is highly valuable. We receive input from our customers regarding their workloads. Based on the nature of these workloads and their intended use for storage – whether for ERP solutions, archives, or backup purposes – we recommend the appropriate storage type. These steps outline our process for evaluating the intended storage workload. Following this workload assessment, we suggest either NAS Unified Storage or Document Storage solutions.

In the portal, there is a tool that enables us to calculate Hitachi's guaranteed effective capacity. It is quite straightforward for customers to comprehend and identify the effective capacity ratio. This is because many customers in Pakistan are already familiar with and using effective capacity ratios. Explaining the concept of effective capacity to customers is not a challenging task.

Customers typically appreciate the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform due to its efficiency, easy product manageability, and product reliability, all of which offer significant benefits to the customers. This is crucial, especially in sectors like banking, where any breach or downtime could lead to substantial losses for customers. The uninterrupted operation of storage is paramount. This substantial benefit not only ensures customer satisfaction but also underscores the value derived from data utilization. 

Hitachi's adaptive data reduction technology assists in decreasing our client's storage footprint by around 50 percent. The majority of our customers were using storage from various vendors. We consolidated this storage into a single system using Hitachi Vantara.

I work for one of the largest commercial banks in Pakistan. We deploy Hitachi Virtual Storage in our primary data center and our remote disaster recovery site. 
It is used for all banking applications like credit and debit card transactions, reconciliation, general ledger, etc. 

The bank has thousands of users accessing more than 2,000 branches across the country. Everyone who accesses our core banking applications and online banking indirectly uses the Hitachi storage platform in our data center. 

The biggest benefit of the Hitachi platform is the 100 percent storage uptime. It's also highly cost-effective. 

I use it for data consolidation management tasks, and we'll go through the control apps. I go to the controller to do that.

Moreover, Hitachi VSP streamlined our data access and storage processes. So, it's got NFS and CIFS.  And the CFIS, too, depends on the disk type we put in,  it can format files and data for different protocols like SMB.So it's versatile in its own ways. 

We use it in conjunction with the cloud. So it's multi-tenant, making sure that it is cloud-ready. This is cloud-ready hardware and software. And, the VSPs have the capacity to integrate other third-party software and the engine is very, very powerful.

The deployment could be a bit easier, because it's a bit tricky.

The product is used in our company since we have implemented a proxy server for our organization from Hitachi. With Hitachi, my company has dealt with the planning, implementation, and migration of the products. The migration was done specifically from our company's site. Hitachi provided the planning and implementation plans, and the full implementation process was carried out with the help of Hitachi's partner.

The solution's most valuable feature is that it provides a secure gateway with SSL inspection. The tool also allows our company to control a user's internet access on a time-based or quota-based basis.

VSP systems run on our core OS as our storage recovery solutions, including SVOS (Storage Virtual Operating System).

We primarily use it for data stability and various hospital operations, including RMAs, patient responses, faxes, emails, and scheduling tasks.

We use primarily mid-range storage solutions like the VSP G350 or VSP G590.

We use Hitachi VSP for data center consolidation. For VMware, we deploy shared storage solutions with VSP, which supports multiple ports. This aids in data consolidation efforts.

With VSP, we leverage a 3DC architecture, incorporating NDR and FDR for a 100% data availability guarantee. This is especially valuable for our banking customers.

We use Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform's 5500 series.

Hitachi's support helps us to quickly and effectively resolve any issues we may have.

Hitachi's roadmap is good. They maintain consistent performance levels with each new version and a robust platform. While we don't anticipate significant innovations in storage, the current storage capabilities are commendable.

I am satisfied with the decision to purchase Hitachi products because they provide a storage solution with good performance and quality, which is exactly what we need.

The solution's performance, specifically IOPS, is good. Since we have a complex business, knowing that the system's performance is reliable provides us with peace of mind.

The flexible media option, which helps consolidate multiple use cases within the same platform, is very important because it provides a significant performance boost. 

We utilize both VMware virtual machines and physical machines across different teams. We operate with two thousand servers. In our current setup, we are a serious customer with thirteen Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform systems. We have just recently expanded by purchasing additional big storage.

The active data management of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, especially with the HOPS Center, makes it easier to work with the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform infrastructure. Previously, it was difficult to create and delete LUNs, which would take a long time, but now with HOPS Center, it is functioning correctly. It is now as easy as working with EMC or Dell storage, and the performance is better, especially with new features. The solution's performance, security, and cost are satisfactory. These factors influenced our decision to purchase Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform.

For the banking sector, here in Pakistan, we deploy it as primary storage.

The first benefit is the system's availability. Only Hitachi offers "eight nines". Also, the compression rate can provide a financial benefit, and a further benefit is the performance. There's no performance degradation after applying the compression.

In terms of Hitachi's all-flash technology, there is a smaller footprint with more performance. The footprint is smaller because there isn't a need for many disks and this means there is a reduction in the need for power and cooling. Also, space being used in the data center on the rack is reduced.