Hitachi NAS Platform Reviews

We are a system integrator and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It is a mass storage system.

An example of one use case that has been deployed is a CIFS solution in a home directory environment. We have also implemented it as part of a media server solution.

The most valuable feature is its ability to handle a high number of users while maintaining both stability and performance. For example, with more than 100,000 users, the performance is stable. With some other NAS products, as the number of users increases, the performance decreases.

We would like to have a more economical version of this solution that is suitable for use with a mid-range scale, such as one that can handle between 35,000 and 50,000 users.

The manageability needs to be improved, as the interface for doing so is not that great.

I would like to see the inclusion of support for cloud-connectivity to providers like AWS.

We have been using Hitachi NAS for about ten years.

The stability is great.

Hitachi NAS is for enterprise-level organizations but the standard varies across the world. It is easy to scale but in Sri Lanka, you will have 10,000 or 20,000 users, maximum.

Hitachi's technical support is good.

I have used solutions by Dell EMC and they are easier to use. EMC also has cloud-connectivity built-in.

I would say that the initial setup is of medium complexity. It is not as easy as these "on the fly" solutions but it is not that much harder, either.

The length of time required for deployment depends on the customer, their requirements, and their environment. It may take a couple of days to complete.

We have an in-house team that does the implementation and deployment for our customers.

Maintenance is not done by us or the customer, but rather the partner. It involves installing updates and things like that.

This solution is not suitable for SMB because the price is more expensive. Costs are based on the features and it is a considerable amount. It really depends on the needs of the client.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to get support for the process. It's not a customer-implementable solution if you don't have a Hitachi-certified engineer.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• Performance
• Replication
• You can use any type of storage as a backend
• Mixed NFS/CIFS file services

• Higher performance
• File-server consolidation
• Ability to create a mixed NFS/CIFS (Samba style) file services solution

• Better QA
• Reporting
• Better quota management
• Ability to backup with all snapshots included.
• Ability to snapshot a file system in the DR site while replicating with JetMirror
• Better documentation
• Better community

I've used it for two to three years.

It had some ridiculous bugs during deployment.

We have had two stability issues:

• We had a bad software version that used to randomly crash both nodes in a cluster
• File system corruption after activating in DR site

No issues yet.

It's at a fair level but has bad documentation.

It's fair.

I previously used Netapp's solution, but this was for a different customer.

It’s relatively easy to setup and install.

We used a mix of a vendor team along with an in-house team. The vendor team was good.

We got the equipment via a large storage accusation for almost free so no ROI was needed.

No, not for this particular customer.

Some bugs cause issues but I love the ASIC architecture behind it. I actually uncovered some hidden ASICs in the hardware. Version 8 features didn’t include in-line de-duplication (it uses an ASIC) which was later uncovered in version 10 or so. It’s nice to find out about added functionality with version upgrades at no extra cost with as little to no performance degradation using this ASIC.