Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Reviews

It's for our internal network SAN for about 100 virtual machines. It's about the IOPS. We were looking for a model that would have enough IOPS for these types of virtual machines. IOPS and latency are very important for us because we are running an application, on these virtual machines, that deals with building and milliseconds are very important.

Hitachi's adaptive data reduction technology has helped reduce our storage footprint. This was one of the reasons we bought the solution. It saves us about 80 percent versus another vendor's solution.

One of the features, for us, that is important is the monitoring platform integrated into the solution. It has all the elements that we need to see, at all times, to be sure the platform is working right.

There is room for improvement in terms of the IP solution.

I have been using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990 for three years.

In three years, we have only had four big issues.

Hitachi's effective capacity guarantee has been valuable for us. They provide us a certain capacity with a limit. When we reach this limit, we buy the next step. That means we always have enough capacity.

We use the solution for a specific department with about 200 people in it.

We haven't had to scale it because we bought the biggest option for this solution. We don't plan to increase our usage.

We have had too many issues.

Neutral

We had a Hitachi solution as well, before this one. When doing our assessment of the solution, we had a dedicated Hitachi partner who helped us to check into the IOPS and latency.

I was part of the project from the initial internal requirements. The initial deployment was somewhat complex when it came to the installation because of the network connectivity. It was more difficult, in this specific case, than with other platforms.

We used the embedded management for the installation. It made the latter part of the deployment easy, but the first part was very complicated for us.

The deployment was done directly with Hitachi.

We have seen ROI.

The main difference between Hitachi and other vendors is the cost. At the time that we bought the solution, it was the best option but the price, compared to other vendors, is a little high.

Once the platform is up and running, it's very fast. But for integration, it's not the best option.

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.

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 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.

I use Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform for different applications in my company to ensure their good performance. I also use the tool for replication.

I cannot give my opinion or suggestions on what needs improvement in the product since I need to better understand it.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform needs to improve its scalability options where there are a few shortcomings.

I have been using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform for a year. I use the solution's latest version.

The product offers high stability. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I think that since Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform has been a long-standing solution in the market compared to all the other solutions I have seen over the years. I don't know about the scalability part of the tool, but I know that I am into the product. In some situations, my company may need to go to the next high-end model of the solution, meaning that we may not always be able to continue with the existing models of the solution in our company, and there may arise a need to go to different kinds of models or other models in the market.

I am just an engineer in my company, but I don't use the solution much since I am mostly involved with it as an administrator.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I worked on different solutions but not with the customers I deal with currently. I have worked with different companies, older versions, and models of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and other storage tools. Everything depends upon the customers' needs.

The product's initial setup phase is not very difficult since it doesn't take much time to do. In my company, we work with an IT technician and Hitachi's field engineer during the deployment phase of the product, but I don't know how the setup is done.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. It currently works on an integrated setup or is better described as a hybrid integrated setup. The tool is integrated with multiple cloud technologies, but I am not sure how it was done or works.

The solution can be deployed in a few days or around a week.

I have seen a higher return on investment from the use of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform in my company. I can see the profits made by my company, but I don't know how much it is exactly, so I feel that the product's use definitely fetches returns.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is a very expensive product. The cost of the product depends upon the company's customers' requirements, so if they require higher redundancy, then the product will become more cost-effective for them.

I use Hitachi Command Suite for provisioning. In general, I use products from Hitachi to deal with the different kinds of approaches with my company's customers, which usually includes giving better solutions to customers.

For a single solution, two people or three people, we can maintain it, but it depends. One person cannot look into the maintenance part of the tool for an entire day. The product's maintenance phase depends upon how big the infrastructure is and how many services from the solution are required by a user.

It is an okay solution that is not bad.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We're only using the F Series in our lab for hosting lab infrastructure for all our colleagues. We needed fast storage.

The solution hasn't really improved our organization as it's only for lab infrastructure. It's not business-critical.

However, it has helped reduce our storage footprint. Previously, we had four storage systems and now we have only one F Series for the whole lab infrastructure.

The deduplication is useful for us because we don't have that much money for our lab infrastructure. Deduplication means we have more storage available. And the IOPS are really fast.

One problem is that there are too many management tools for the F Series and for all the other Hitachi storage systems. There are four or five such solutions. Maybe these could be combined in the future.

I've been using the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series for half a year.

There are about 400 users who access our labs across the whole company.

We haven't had to use their support yet.

We have used NetApp, HyperFlex, and vSAN—a lot of solutions. We switched because our main infrastructure is Hitachi and we wanted to keep it all with one vendor.

The deployment of the solution was straightforward. We used the embedded management for the installation and it simplified things. Using it is like a reset and it was really straightforward.

We haven't had to scale it yet and we don't have plans to increase our usage of it at the moment.

Overall, we are very satisfied with Hitachi's product. Managing it is very easy and the F Series is very stable. In general, the stability of Hitachi products is really good.

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.

We used the G Series as our primary shared storage, SAN storage. It hosted all of the critical applications and databases.

The G Series may not have improved our organization, but it basically met the status quo of what we had been doing.

The performance was decent. 

We moved away from this product because we were looking for an all-flash solution, and with our G1500 at the time, perhaps two years ago, they were just proposing more of the same technology. What we wanted was a flash solution that was developed from the ground-up. I think that since then, HDS has come out with an updated product, newer than the G1500 that we had.

For us, continuing to use products from this vendor would have required having a solution that was revamped as flash storage from the ground-up, as opposed to a historical frame that's just evolved over the years.

We used the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series for approximately seven years and have just moved away from using it.

This product was stable and there were certainly no issues that I remember.

When we purchased it, we bought the full capacity of the frame. With it fully-populated on day one, there was no need for us to scale.

This was our main storage device, so 90% of applications and 90% of our users were situated on it.

The technical support was good. There is always room for improvement but I have no specifics with regards to their support.

Over the past seven years, we used three different versions. We started with the VSP, then upgraded to the G1000, and then the G1500 was the most recent one.

We used the Dell EMC DMX series, as well. All the software products that we had, we were comfortable with when we were on the EMC DMX series. So, after switches, it was all the same kind of software and functionality that we were used to. It wasn't really over and above what we had with EMC at the time, but rather just more of the same.

The reason we switched is that after putting out an RFP, we evaluated options based on the technology and pricing. Hitachi was the winner.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

My advice is that everybody has to do their own due diligence. The G Series is a good product but it isn't meet our requirements 

In summary, this is a very good product but there's always room for improvement. It certainly served our purposes at the time.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.