Hitachi Vantara VSP 5500: the world’s fastest data storage
Hitachi Vantara, an enterprise storage array business, has announced the addition of the VSP 5000 series to its premium storage line-up.
The company claims this launch to be the world’s fastest solution of its kind. Currently, the series includes two models: the VSP 5100 and the more capacious VSP 5500.
Both models exist in the all-flash version as well as the hybrid variant combining flash memory and traditional hard drives. In the latter case, the model number is followed by the letter H: the 5100H and 5500H. Regardless of the version, the 5000 series arrays use an “Accelerated Fabric” for internal connectivity between controllers and drives.
The highest performance is claimed to be 4.2m IOPS for the 5100 and 5100H, and 21m for the 5500 and 5500H arrays. The internal raw capacity limits for the 5100 and 5500 are 23PB and 69PB accordingly. The linear speeds are 25 and 149 GB/s, and the minimum latency is 70μs for the whole series.
The VSP 5000 has a modular architecture. For instance, the 5100s have a single controller block with two controllers and four acceleration modules for the internal fabric. The latter is based on PCIe Gen 3.0 x 4 lanes. It supports direct memory access, which, combined with the widespread use of FPGAs, allows the new systems to achieve record IOPS performance levels.
The VSP 5000 also addresses reliability issues through the use of quadruple redundancy that delivers 99.999999% availability. This allows distributing data across controller blocks for enhanced price-performance.
For resource-saving purposes, the 5000s implement an advanced system of data deduplication and compression. The guaranteed data reduction ratio is 4:1, while in some scenarios it can reach 7:1. Up to 5.5:1 data reduction is achieved on the fly, virtually without any loss in system performance, assures Hitachi.
In terms of capacity, the new VSP 5000 is far superior to the existing VSP F all-flash series. While the latter uses only the original Hitachi flash module drives (FMDs) with 14TB capacity and 15TB SAS drives, the VSP 5000s also introduce NVMe drives ranging up to 30 TB in capacity. The hybrid variants use either 2.5-inch disk drives with a capacity of 2.4 TB and a rotation speed of 10,000 rpm or 14 TB, 7,200 rpm, 3.5-inch disk drives.
Vantara VSP 5000 support Fibre Channel (16 and 32Gbits/s), FICON (16Gbit/s), and iSCSI (10Gbit/s) interfaces.
The VSP 5000 series storage arrays also integrate with a VSP Cloud Connect Pack that can move data to a public cloud to free up capacity.
In addition to the release of the VSP 5000, Hitachi Vantara also introduced a proprietary infrastructure management software, Ops Center. The system uses AI techniques and machine learning to optimize data center workload performance and speed up applications. The manufacturer claims that the software is able to automate around 70% of data center workloads. It is already available on the market.
