Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Reviews

We primarily use the solution for storage for our customers. 

My customer still has previous storage 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. 

The product can be made into a multi-controller system instead of just being a tool that offers a two-controller system to users since it is one of the areas where the product lacks. From a controller perspective, the tool should offer scalability. The tool should also offer better manageability options, considering that users have multiple storages in their environment and need to control them with the help of a single pane of glass. The solution does provide users with the option to opt for a single console from where everything can be managed, but it is not available for free. The manageability area can be improved if a single console is made available to users for free.

I have been using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform for around ten years. My company has a partnership with Hitachi Vantara.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The controllers in the product do not provide options for scalability. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E Series is useful for medium to large-sized enterprises.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I rate the initial setup phase a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a difficult process, and ten means it is an easy process. The product's installation phase is easy.

There are boxes available under the product, and they get implemented depending on the different kinds of workloads in my company, because of which, the tool may get used in clouds, VDIs, and GPU servers for high-performance computing.

The solution can be deployed in two to three hours.

Considering the solution's price, it is very competitive compared to the other competitors in the market. I rate the product price a nine out of ten. My company purchases the licenses for the solution in a bundle, owing to which our company gets a very competitive price compared to the pricing models offered by its competitors.

The product has improved our company's data storage scalability aspect, considering that my organization uses Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E Series. My company uses Hitachi VSP E990 All-Flash NVMe Storage Platform and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E1090 for production storage purposes. My company relies on All-NVMe Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. In our organization, we never faced a performance issue with the product.

The product has improved our company's data retrieval time tremendously since we don't see any performance issues with the tool in our company. My company has not seen any issues with the tool's data retrieval time or response time.

The most valuable feature of the product for our company's data management needs stems from the fact that the tool provides multiple functionalities, like Hitachi HDD drivers. The tool offers in-built encryption, ensuring that data security is available in the solution. My company also gets a good number of compression and data efficiency ratios. My company gets to see a 1:2.5 compression ratio, allowing us to save a lot of space. From a capacity perspective, I see that the product consumption in our company is very high due to multiple workloads running on the boxes from Hitachi. The product offers more capacity than a single box. I have around three petabytes of storage, which is a huge storage capacity.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform reliability and uptime support our company's machine-critical applications since the tool offers 100 percent uptime and has never gone down in our company in the last three years.

In terms of performance and ability, the product can stand up against its competitors since the solution offers two controller systems to users. The tool also offers a good performance in comparison to the other products in the market. My company has workloads of variable block sizes. A lot of storage platforms fail when there are variable block sizes, but there is a sustenance level that Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform offers in such scenarios. Instead of considering the differences in block sizes, the product tries to offer a consistent and good performance to users.

The product's integration capabilities with the tools in our company's existing infrastructure are possible. It is very easy to use the integration features of the product. My company tested the product's integration functionalities, and we found that it worked fine in our infrastructure. I think that the product's integration capabilities are convenient and easy to use.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it, considering that its price-to-performance ratio is very good. The product also offers a good efficiency ratio. The tool's performance is much better in comparison with the other storage platforms in the market.

I rate the product a nine out of ten.

In my experience, I've encountered several limitations, particularly in the operational tasks, when dealing with unified storage. I've faced significant performance issues, especially when extending block capacities. The operational challenges, such as the console getting blocked and preventing any activity, have been a recurring issue.

For instance, extending a replicated volume from one site to another involves breaking the mirror application, adding unnecessary complexities. Unlike other products, like Dell, where extending volumes is straightforward, this process on this platform requires multiple steps, including breaking and reestablishing the application, making it time-consuming and not straightforward. 

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform faces challenges when it comes to features like deduplication and compression. Enabling these features can lead to processor overload, resulting in performance degradation, especially under high loads.

It faces limitations, particularly during code upgrades. If the CPU utilization exceeds 65 percent, the standard procedures for firmware or code upgrades are restricted.

I have been working with the product for four years. 

I rate the product’s stability a five out of ten. 

There are no significant challenges in terms of scalability, and it can accommodate larger storage capacities compared to other storage solutions.

The support experience with Hitachi VSP is characterized by a lengthy process for issue resolution. For a simple problem, the support team typically requests logs, which take about 30 minutes to generate. Uploading the logs adds another 30 minutes, and the engineer's review of the logs requires an additional hour. Consequently, the entire process takes two hours, leaving the system in a critical state without a resolution during that time.

Negative

I rate the product’s deployment one out of ten. The deployment process lasted for three months.The initial deployment encountered numerous performance issues, leading to instability and frequent disruptions in production. The on-site engineering team was actively engaged for almost three months to address and resolve these challenges.

The integration process of Hitachi VSP into the existing IT infrastructure is not straightforward and is a bit complex.

The initial deployment was initially attempted by a third party, but they were unsuccessful in resolving the issues. Subsequently, Hitachi engineers were directly engaged and worked on-site for nearly three months, facing challenges throughout the process.

The solution is expensive. 

I rate the overall product a four 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.

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.

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.

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.

Our primary use case is a hybrid private cloud that includes generic server virtualization based on VMware ESXi. The second use case is workstation virtualization — virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The third is database systems with IBM Power and IBM IX logical partitions.

Data optimization, compression, and deduplication are the most important features for us.

I would like to see Hitachi improve their management software. It's been three years since they introduced Ops Center, their management product, and it still hasn't reached at least 50 percent of the capability we require. We are using legacy software because the product Hitachi offers does not stack up in functionality.

Hitachi should increase the number of possible functions Ops Center can perform. For example, it is impossible to manage any kind of storage replication using this product. All competing solutions provide that, but you need to install a separate solution to manage replication in Hitachi arrays. It was not the case with legacy software, but the current solution doesn't have that.

We've been using Hitachi VSP for about four years.

Hitachi VSP is stable in most cases, but we've had a few hiccups with the storage firmware. 

Hitachi VSP scales pretty well, but it generally depends on storage costs. The high-end arrays have huge scalability limits. Generally, we are limited mainly by the array controllers' performance, not the array's capacity limits. 

Our environment is massive. We have approximately 15,000 users for virtual desktop solutions, about 16,000 email users, and approximately 6,000 to 7,000 servers running on VMware platforms. We also have a few hundred logical partitions on IBM Power servers.

We regularly contact Hitachi technical support. The idea of a storage array is that it's broken up into many small pieces of storage. Each piece may fail, and they do from time to time. Therefore, we typically have to open five or six cases every month for mundane tasks like replacing failed disk drives. That's typical for any customer using storage on a large scale.

Those are minor cases, but storage controller failures are more serious, and we see three or four every year. We also have two or three performance-related cases each year. 

We're a relatively large customer, so we do not perform installation ourselves. Service partners typically perform it. We have three people managing the storage, three working with the storage area network, and five handling the backups.

All the software licenses are bundled with the storage hardware. I'm not the purchasing guy, so I do not negotiate prices. When the company makes a purchasing decision, I only provide the technical requirements. The price is a question for the purchasing department.

I rate Hitachi VSP seven out of 10. Generally, I wouldn't recommend Hitachi VSP to a customer without a background in storage systems. Solid technical expertise is needed to use these storage solutions on a medium or a large scale.