Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Reviews

I am not an end user. I present the solution to customers. I study a customer's infrastructure and suggest a product based on the customer's needs, such as latency or IOPS performance. I usually work with VSP F700 and F900 models.

Its resilience is the most valuable.

Hitachi should launch some small machines in Brazil. The smallest machine here in Brazil is VSP 350, which can be quite big for some of the customers. In China, Hitachi has small models of this equipment, but those models are not available in our region. 

Its pricing is a big issue for us. We are resellers, and we face some competition from other vendors. Hitachi doesn't always have a good position in terms of the price. Its user interface is also not as good as some of the other competitors, and it can be improved.

I have been working with Hitachi VSP Platform for three or four years.

It is stable. I didn't have any issues with its stability.

It depends on the series of the machine. When we are sizing a machine for our customers, we should consider how big the machine should be for three to five years. Our clients are medium to large organizations.

It used to be very good, but nowadays, it is not so good because Hitachi doesn't provide support for fixes. Another company is now doing fixes for Hitachi.

I don't take care of this area.

It is expensive as compared to other vendors, but its price is good if you are looking for stability, reliability, performance, and security.

Our clients evaluate all competitors, such as EMC, Huawei, and Pure Storage. Price is one of the big issues concerning the competition between these brands. Hitachi is the most expensive, followed by Pure Storage and EMC. Huawei is the cheapest.

Hitachi is one of the traditional brands for storage. People had Hitachi at a certain point in time in the past, but they couldn't continue with Hitachi because of the price. Last December, we sold a solution to a customer who didn't buy Hitachi for maybe seven or eight years. We were able to put a good proposal, and they acquired another Hitachi solution.

I would rate Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for storage for our customers. 

My customer still has previous storage still running. There was nothing wrong with that. However, they wanted to migrate some services and in the meantime are considering new storage, which is why we are using this new solution. 

We've dealt recently with virtual storage. We use the 500-series.

The main benefit of the solution is its reliability.

The solution has a pretty long history of working with different industries. It's easy to coordinate experience. When my customers brought up potential issues with the Hitachi consultant, they seemed to always be able to find a solution to the problem or questions.

The Hitachi roadmap, in terms of adopting new technologies, is very strong. Its roadmap is important to our organization's strategy. 

We are extremely satisfied with the solution. We've been working with them for more than 20 years.

We'd be very likely to recommend the solution to others. I'd give it a ten out of ten in terms of the likelihood of recommending it to others.

The IOPS and latency are okay, however, they aren't the best. There are others on the market that handle it better. They are pretty good with their approach, however. The customer won't complain too much. We have SQL, for example, and it works quite well.

The deployment for small and medium organizations is still possible. Their needs aren't as large as traditional market share, however, we'd like, in the future, for Hitachi to ensure that they can handle companies of all sizes.

The adoption of the newest technologies must always be prioritized. New areas of technology must be adopted by the solution to keep it relevant.

The storage can be improved. You need an operating system to run a computer. If they had a certain approach to layered storage, it would be better. For example, adaption to the browser, or having a centralized console.

We've been using the solution for many years.

So far, we are pretty satisfied with stability.

The solution provides excellent scalability.

I've seen the demos for Hitachi's effective capacity guarantee, however, we don't get close to the capacity, so we haven't had a chance to test capacity and how it works. We've never touched the boundaries. It's straightforward to understand, however.

I've been pretty satisfied with the support overall. 

Positive

I did not use embedded management for the installation process. 

We have more than one Hitachi supplier working with us, depending on the project.

Hitachi solutions are a little more expensive. However, they are still in the realm of the competition.

As long-time users, I'd advise other users to spend more time with the Hitachi consultant. Some licensing needs to be considered in order to find ways to save money. You can do different things to achieve your goals without purchasing a license. Experts will give you many different ideas of how to achieve your goals. 

We're consulting partners. We work with many different Hitachi customers and partners. We work with design and implementation. 

The adaptive data and reduction technology has not helped us reduce our storage footprint, as I am still in the process of understanding the scenarios around that aspect of the product.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

It is very flexible, and it is very useful when you want to virtualize different storage from different vendors.

It is absolutely reliable.

In terms of ransomware, Pure Storage is probably a couple of steps ahead of Hitachi, but Hitachi does not rush in terms of features. They want to be really sure that the hardware works properly without any kind of problem in new environments, and the implementation or improvement does not affect the customer installation. They really want to make sure that customers are not affected in any way.

They should support the real Metro Cluster also for the small systems.

We started to work with this storage about two years ago. 

It is very stable. We have had just one failure on a disk, but due to the protection, we didn't lose any data.

It can scale a lot, much more than our needs.

We have had only one instance when we had the disk failure, and we received some calls from them asking about the instance and applying a new update. They were very good. 

Their support team is absolutely on top of my list due to their knowledge and effectiveness. They can really assist you in any case. If you need any assistance with the configuration, they will be able to assist you. I would rate them a five out of five.

We had another Hitachi system. I don't remember the model, but it was hybrid storage.

It is pretty simple. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of ease.

It is cheap. It is not very expensive. If you decide to expand the system, the cost is pretty low as compared to other vendors, such as Dell.

It is a very flexible solution. If we consider the Hitachi brand with other storage brands, it is on the top of the list. We are very satisfied with its stability, reliability, and affordability.

Any organization deciding to put in place a Hitachi storage solution is doing the right thing. It is probably not the best, but it is absolutely the right solution. They will forget all the problems connected to storage. That's because it works very well, and their support is also very good.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

In addition to being a data center, we are a cloud service provider, so our E990 is connected to our cloud systems. In the cloud itself, we provide storage as a service to the customer from the Hitachi E990 boxes.

The efficiency ratio is just as high as advertised. It's very high relative to other storage solutions as well. The compression and deduplication capabilities are also very high.

One improvement I am hoping for in the next release is unified storage. The other storage systems we use are unified, but E990 is not unified. Only block storage is available. To get the same functionality with the E990, you have to configure it through the NAS setup, which adds some additional costs. I would also like more capacity in a single box — expand the space up to 4 petabytes.

I have been using Hitachi E990 for about one year.

It's a very stable system. In the past year, we haven't had any issues with this.

Scalability is a little bit of an issue. The horizontal scalability is not there—only the vertical scalability is there. 

They're very professional and up to date. Their sales staff and support teams are quite good. The pre-sales support is also excellent.

It's simpler than earlier storage solutions. There are a lot of things that we had to do in the past, but setup and implementation are very simple here. Deployment takes about a week or so. It usually takes no longer than 15 days at most, from the site readiness stage to completion.

I would rate Hitachi an eight out of ten.

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.

The VSP is a machine that works 24/7 throughout the year. The most valuable feature is that it has "eight nines" availability, 99.999999 percent of the time. That is the main selling point. 

Another selling point is the IOPS of Hitachi systems; they are very high and others cannot match them.

Those are the two bullet points: Availability and performance. Hitachi is a best-of-breed storage system.

In addition, there is an effective capacity guarantee. It's a question of virtualization. There is a basic, physical, usable capacity, and effective capacity. Effective capacity is what you get after compression. Hitachi has very good compression, offering a 7:1 compression ratio in their flash boxes. But the guaranteed compression ratio is 4:1 because compression depends on the application and use case. Effectively, on average, we guarantee a compression ratio of 4:1 and there will be no performance degradation.

Also, once the solution has been completely deployed, management of it is easy.

The most common issues we face are connected to replication and parts replacement, such as when there is a disk drive failure.

Also, there is a drawback related to Hitachi's configuration flexibility. The Hitachi storage platform solution is not flexible. That means that both the Hitachi and the partner presale guys have to do a lot of work to design a solution. Once you design a solution, you can't reverse it. There is no flexibility afterward. If you are implementing a solution for a five-year plan, for example, you discuss what the customer will need in those five years. But after implementation the customer cannot then decide they need this or that changed. Customers have to decide things at the point of sale. Other solutions have better flexibility than Hitachi.

We have been working with Hitachi for more than a decade. We are both partners and integrators of Hitachi products. We are also a certified service provider, meaning we have a local team that supports and maintains the system.

Effectively, we don't have any major service activities that cause unavailability of the data or an issue that cannot be solved. That has never happened. These machines are very reliable. They are estimated to work for at least 10 years.

When it comes to business strategy, the only thing the customer wants is that the system is up and running the whole year. We make sure to talk with a customer about their plan for the life of the storage system we are selling. Do they want a three-year plan or a five-year plan or maybe more than five years? We choose the model based on their answer. To summarize our approach in one line, we try to find the best business value that addresses all of a customer's existing challenges.

It's highly scalable.

Hitachi's technical support requires improvement. They don't have a lot of support engineers who can handle all the service requests from all the customers. Other manufacturers have baked-in support. Hitachi doesn't have a support team like that, but they are improving in that regard. They are adding resources and improving the support cycle, but they don't have a very good call-logging mechanism.

If a certified partner is not involved in the support process, I would rate support at five out of 10. With a partner involved, it's a nine. Hitachi's support involves working closely with certified partners who should have a lot of engineers to support customers.

Neutral

Setting it up is not very easy but it's also not so difficult. The time it takes depends on the size of the solution. While it's not so time-consuming, you have to plan for a process that will take at least 15 days. These products are always deployed in high-end, sensitive customer environments, where we are playing with their data, so it does take at least that long.

A senior storage engineer is enough for the deployment. With the addition of a junior-level engineer, the two of them can handle the maintenance.

With Hitachi's embedded management, the initial setup is easy. Only one management software is required and it's embedded in the box. But for the centralized management, there is another product that is deployed on another server.

The embedded management is very easy compared to previous systems where we needed to install a client on the management station. But most solutions have an embedded management platform.

The overall solution might be expensive, but in the long term, the total cost of ownership is better than the TCO of any competitor.

We discuss ROI as part of the presale process. 

A drawback of Hitachi storage systems is that they are expensive. The upfront cost is very high compared to others. But when you compare the IOPS at the same price, Hitachi gives you better business value; their IOPS are always higher than the competitors', but the price may be higher.

In terms of licensing, of course, we talk with the customer about what they need. If they need this feature right now and that feature later on, we discuss that with Hitachi and the licensing model will be defined accordingly, before the sale of the product. Afterward, when the customer asks us to add a license as we had discussed, we can add the license. 

But if a customer didn't discuss with us any kind of future licensing from a feature perspective, buying that license later on, in general, will be very expensive. Before the sale, there's no problem creating a near-cost-effective solution. But getting a license later on is really costly.

In general, whether you are a partner or a customer, you need to discuss the requirements of the solution, the full scope of the work, including capacity, performance, availability, and scalability, before the sale.

Also, do not undersize your storage. That is something that will kill any solution.

And only apply compression after one or two years, not from the first day of storage. If you are out of capacity and need to buy more storage, the procurement process for extra storage will take a few months, so that is the time to apply compression.

As a partner, we have to connect with a customer after the sale as well. It's not only about the product. It's also about the partner that sold the product working with the customer to make sure they are satisfied, even when there is no problem with the product. If the collaboration and connection are not good, whenever a customer calls, the partner won't respond to their query properly. So it's not just a one-day job. The product could be really good, but if the response time and the way the customer is handled is not good, the customer will not be satisfied. Our customers are satisfied with the Hitachi storage platform.

We don't recommend a single-node implementation. It's very risky. One controller cannot provide a high-availability solution, which is a feature of every storage system these days.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is used for our storage area network.

Hitachi's ability to quickly impact and resolve issues is good. When we had an issue a few months back, we were contacted by Hitachi and they upgraded us free of charge automatically.

Hitachi's roadmap is important because, without it, our organization would not run properly.

We are very satisfied with our decision to purchase Hitachi products. We originally planned to buy Dell products, but they were unable to deliver them due to a chipset shortage. We are fortunate that we chose Hitachi, as their products are incredibly fast and the price was good. We have no regrets about our decision.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform's IOPS and latency are great.

Compared to Dell, the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is much faster. We can start 50 servers at one time on the host without seeing the dial drop.

It is important to our organization that we have flexible media options such as NVMe with the solution.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform's adaptive data reduction technology helps us reduce storage on a ratio of 1:3.

The embedded management for installation simplified the solution's ease of management.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform's embedded management is more powerful and efficient than the previous solution. It has been so easy to use that we haven't had to do anything manually in the past year.

Reliability, compression, and speed are the most valuable features.

Although the speed is good, there is always room for improvement.

I would like the fan noise to be automatically adjusted based on the drive's current workload.

I have been using the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform for 15 months.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is stable.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is scalable.

Hitachi's technical support is perfect.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. I completed the deployment myself, which took one week. 

The implementation was completed in-house.

I give the price of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform a nine out of ten.

I give Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform a ten out of ten.

80 percent of our employees in-house are using the solution with additional people around the world.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform notifies us if any maintenance is required.

I recommend Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform.

Here at Philips, we are using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series for image history purposes, in particular, restoring high-resolution images for our customers.

What I like best about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is that it's a fast storage solution. It also has reliable models. The sales support is also good for this product. Even the pricing for it is good.

At the moment, I don't see any room for improvement in Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series because my experience with the product is very good. The software is okay and you can manage the storage well.

What I'd like to see in the next release of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is for it to be a real NAS solution because right now, you need to use a Hitachi converter called HNAS which makes the process a little bit more expensive. In my opinion, Hitachi should look into the possibility of unifying the HNAS into full storage, meaning that the HNAS should be integrated into the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series.

I've been using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series, and the first storage my company ever bought from Hitachi was in 2015. I'm still using the product.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is a stable product.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is easy to scale.

I'm rating the technical support team of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series a ten.

Positive

Setting up Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series was easy.

The licensing cost of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series, whether it would be high or more affordable, would depend on location. For example, here in Brazil, Hitachi charges in dollars and this means my company still needs to convert that into local currency. Sometimes, my company also needs to discuss the pricing with the Hitachi sales team and request for a discount. At the moment, pricing for Hitachi is high, but my team can have some global funding or global accounts that would help reach the price my company is aiming for.

I'm using Unity, Isilon, and Hitachi, particularly Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series, actually several different storage solutions and models.

The models of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series which I have include the G350, G370, G400, and the G600.

Around one thousand people use Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series within my company.

My advice to people looking into using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is to look into the product because it's a very good product. It's reliable, but you should also prepare the environment well for the hardware. You should have a good understanding of your needs and why you should go with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series, and not compare Hitachi with other solutions that aren't comparable to the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series. You should listen well and understand what the Hitachi sales team is proposing and explaining to ensure that you're buying the product that you need.

My rating for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is ten out of ten.

My company is a partner of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series though it doesn't sell the hardware to end customers. What my company does is buy the hardware from Hitachi, then it offers it as hardware as a service to the customers.

I use this solution in the data center of the office of Mexico's Secretary of Education. I work with different hosts. In this case, it had to be HP-UX, Linux, and Windows. I work with the entire family of Hitachi hardware, but for this case, I work with the CBS500 and CB2500 Blade. I use all kinds of software, like Command Director and Device Manager.

For the support windows to work, maybe they have to upgrade the firmware of the VSP. They changed the hardware or the disk. I don't know if it was the port blade they changed or a VM for a memory cache. Also, replacing the old target with the processor target would be fine. The old equipment is very easy to manage, and I don't have any bad commentary.

I have worked with this equipment for the last two years. When I worked before in Hitachi Data Systems, I worked for a data architect and designed complete solutions, so I have a lot of interaction with the clients.  I handle the solutions, the capacity of the disk, configuration, initial set up, definitions of the DP pools, assigning the volumes, creating the entire SAN, etc. Also, I manage the SAN switches. I worked for Pearson, Sonic, Mobiistar, Macromer, Mynorte, and Santander. Every time, I created the whole environment— all open and the mainframe in development. For example, at Ponavid, I created the whole solution, assigned the space, performed all the troubleshooting, as well as supported all the hardware and the performance.

Yes it's very scalable. For example, in the VSP, you can scale the capacity of the disk in-tray and also in the mid-range. In the VSP, the tray is a bit bigger obviously, and I think the disk is the same. And also when you escalate the new equipment, configuration is very easy as well.

When I with work with Hitachi Vantara, I oversee the troubleshooting and support. I am the engineer who provides support, and so it's easy. Once we installed using the harddrive manager, when hardware failed.  Support created a case and assigned this to me and I am the engineer. I take the case and I have to take a solution to the client.

The setup is very easy to manage and configure. The initial setup and takes one hour more or less. And when I check the old disk and processor or the memory cache, I check the blade also. Next, I changed the disk, created the configuration, and installed the old disk. This takes maybe one hour extra. Depending on the performance of the old disk and the capacity, it could take maybe three or four hours. Sometimes, it takes eight. Then I created a SAN, a port, the host groups, the DP pools, and the dynamic provisioning. And for performance troubleshooting, I take a dump. For example, I check the read-write performance of the IO as well as the performance of the port, the workflow, the workload, and the memory cache. 

It always depends on what technology you need. Because if you need a very fast flash disk, it's going to be more expensive obviously. But if you need a backup solution, it's fine, because the technology is advanced, but it fits in some cases.

I rate Hitachi 10 out of 10.