Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000
Comparative Guide
Primary Comparative guide
helps identify requirements and
accelerate business goals
Many organizations are turning to storage
virtualization to address the challenges they face in
managing storage and enabling greater IT agility.
But many storage virtualization products don’t live
up to the promise, causing IT to spend more time
managing a diverse array of storage products. A
storage virtualization platform that offers mature
virtualization capabilities allows IT to meet today’s
challenges with an always-available, agile and
automated foundation for a trusted Continuous
Cloud Infrastructure.
Virtualized storage platforms vary drastically from
company to company, often forcing businesses to
make tradeoffs between cost, performance and
efficiency. We developed this comparative guide to
help IT executives understand the current virtual-
ized storage landscape. By comparing the benefits
of various offerings, you can easily identify a solu-
tion that will meet your current and future storage
requirements.
COMPARATIVEGUIDE
ORM VIRTUALIZATION ECONOMICS INNOVATE
D INFORMATION GLOBAL CHANGE INTELLIGENT TECHNOL
SIGHT OPPORTUNITY SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE INTEGRA
FLEXIBILITY
Choose the Best Storage Virtualization Platform
for Your Enterprise
IT decision-makers face multiple challenges
in managing enterprise storage today. Storage
needs continue to grow and new types of
business-critical applications demand consistent
response times, more scalability and no down-
time. Often, today’s data centers house infra-
structure silos built around specific business
applications or technologies. These data silos
limit IT agility and the ability to meet the new
demands of the business.
COMPARATIVE GUIDE
Comparative Overview
of Storage Virtualization
Platforms
This Comparative Guide illustrates
the strength of Hitachi Virtual Storage
Platform G1000 (VSP G1000) and Hitachi
Storage Virtualization Operating System
(SVOS) relative to currently available
enterprise storage virtualization platforms.
Based on value, data growth, risk and
innovation, VSP G1000 and SVOS offer
clear IT and business advantages (see
Table 1). You no longer need to compro-
mise between enterprise functionality and
midrange value. The advantages of VSP
G1000 include:
■■ 1.9x more drives per chassis to
increase storage density and reduce
energy costs.
■■ 50% less administrative effort to save
time and improve productivity.
■■ 100% availability guarantee to lower risk
and ensure data availability.
■■ 90% less refresh effort to accelerate
innovation and business productivity.
 Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 and Hitachi
Storage Virtualization Operating System deliver enterprise-
class storage virtualization. Together, they help you to
manage more data more efficiently, at higher performance
and service levels with a lower operating cost. 
TABLE 1. OVERVIEW COMPARISON OF ENTERPRISE-CLASS STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION OFFERINGS
	 Storage Virtualization Offerings
Features	 Hitachi Global	 IBM® San	 EMC VMAX	 EMC 	
	 Virtualization	 Volume	 Federated	 VPLEX
	 Capability	 Controller	 Tiered Storage
■■ Enterprise scalability (block/file performance and connectivity)
Reduce operating costs, increase value
■■ Integrated resilient active-active data center support
■■ Single multivendor management interface with local and
remote replication support up to 3 data centers
■■ Low environmental requirement
■■ Protect quality of service with competing workload
■■ Nondisruptive firmware update without quality of service impact
■■ Self-service nondisruptive technology refresh support with GUI
workflow
■■ Unified file, block and object data
■■ Replicated LUN migration support on any type of volume
■■ Plug-and-play virtualization without file system lock-in
■■ File capacity efficiency support without quality of service impact
■■ Discover block and file configurations
■■ Storage features that extend to external storage with existing
data
■■ Consolidated file and block management dashboard
Reduce risk, maximize availability
ACCELERATE innovation and productivity
Increased return on existing assets
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✔
✔	 ✖	 ✔	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✔	 ✔	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✔	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✔	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
✔	 ✖	 ✖	 ✖
3
Reduce Operating Costs,
Increase Value
The data center of today is expensive to
manage and maintain, and administrative
overhead reduces the value that IT
can deliver to the business. As reliance
on technology for business-critical
applications grows, IT must deliver more
value, support a new breed of applications
at cloud scale, and do so without
increasing budgets.
VSP G1000 and SVOS reduce IT
overhead, simplifiy storage management,
and reach new levels of scalability
throughout the enterprise with global
storage virtualization unmatched by any
vendor. Within a single management
interface, VSP G1000 enables enterprise
scalability through the industry’s highest
performance hardware for improved
application response time and improved
connectivity. Without the connectivity
limitations of other vendors’ storage
virtualization solutions. You can increase
virtual machine density to new levels,
reducing the costs of managing different
storage systems separately.
VSP G1000 gives you cost-saving
efficiency by simplifying your storage man-
agement process. Where other vendors
leave you managing multiple systems, VSP
G1000 offers a single solution for manag-
ing heterogeneous multivendor storage,
independent of connectivity, location, stor-
age system or vendor. When combined
with remote data replication support, VSP
G1000 allows you to create new storage
system and data center extensibility: You
can provision and manage virtual storage
machines with active-active volumes up to
100km apart1
.
Simplified storage management with the
VSP G1000 means that your IT staff can
do less work to maintain interoperability
between technology layers. Business con-
tinuity and disaster recovery processes
become more efficient as well, allowing
you to lower costs by having each admin-
istrator manage more terabytes of storage.
Furthermore, VSP G1000 lets you reach
new levels of storage consolidation, con-
serving energy and reducing your data
center footprint. It holds up to 1.9 times
more drives per chassis than competing
solutions. With data center costs reach-
ing as high as US$40,000 per square foot
per year to operate, VSP G1000 delivers
www.HDS.com/innovate
Innovation is the engine of change, and
information is its fuel. Innovate intelligently
to lead your market, grow your company,
and change the world. Manage your
information with Hitachi Data Systems.
important space savings. By consolidating
file, block and object storage natively on
a single system with VSP G1000, you will
lower your operating expenses and
energy costs.
Increase Return on Existing
Assets
With ever-increasing data growth driven by
factors inside and outside the business,
along with tighter IT budgets, you need
ways to get the most value from your
current storage assets. VSP G1000 and
SVOS maximize your return on your
storage investment. Together, they allow
you to manage and extend the life of your
existing storage and consolidate all of your
data into a single, virtualized platform. With
native quality of service QoS management
and active-active support of VSP G1000,
your storage can handle higher application
and virtual machine density per system
than competing storage platforms.
Many organizations struggle with various
infrastructure silos, creating storage
shortages in 1 silo, while leaving excess
capacity stranded in another. VSP G1000
solves this problem with a platform for
aggregating all file, block and object
storage services, including multivendor
storage resources, into a single pool of
enterprise storage capacity. You can also
improve capacity utilization by integrating
active data, archiving and NAS services
in a single platform, all managed from a
single place. And while competing systems
treat all data equally, VSP G1000 allows
you to prioritize workloads to improve
concurrency while maintaining high
storage density. With support for active-
active volumes up to 100km apart, you
can benefit from increased storage density
without additional risk exposure.
Upgrades and refreshes to the storage
system can be difficult, too. Your business-
critical applications need to run with no
disruption, but online firmware upgrades
and storage system refreshes from
other vendors can have a significant
impact on workload.
VSP G1000 gives you
the tools you need to
make sure that when
upgrades and refreshes
happen, your business-
critical applications aren’t
impacted. It allows you to refresh your
technology with up to 90% less effort than
competing alternatives. And VSP G1000
provides features like deduplication without
impacting throughput and response time
for your business-critical applications,
ensuring maximum productivity.
Reduce Risk, Maximize
Availability
Not only do you face massive data growth,
but you face an increasingly complex set
of requirements to limit data loss. As reli-
ance on technology to run the business
continues to grow, so do the risks to stor-
age. Outages cause costly downtime and
have a negative impact on your brand.
Outages and data loss can also have
costly legal and compliance ramifications
as well. And as storage architecture has
grown more complex, you need to main-
tain the integrity of transactions across
many application tiers. With so many
demands, it’s clear that data protection is
more critical than ever before.
A solid data protection system allows
you to mitigate the risks associated with
a complex storage architecture. You
can deliver better customer service, and
address compliance requirements from
inside and outside the organization.
VSP G1000 has a proven and trusted
technology track record. It is the only
enterprise platform backed by a 100%
data availability, a guarantee you can’t find
with any competing vendor.
With VSP G1000, data protection is main-
tained for both local and remote data, a
level of protection competing platforms
cannot offer. As recovery point objec-
tives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives
(RTOs) become shorter, reflecting less
DOWNLOAD
Take The
First Step.
Build Your
Future.
© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2014. All rights reserved. HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. Innovate With Information is a trademark or registered
trademark of Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names are properties of their respective owners.
Notice: This document is for informational purposes only, and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied, concerning any equipment or service offered or to be offered
by Hitachi Data Systems Corporation.
BR-10072 MC April 2014
Corporate Headquarters
2845 Lafayette Street
Santa Clara, CA 95050-2639 USA
www.HDS.com community.HDS.com
Regional Contact Information
Americas: +1 408 970 1000 or info@hds.com
Europe, Middle East and Africa: +44 (0) 1753 618000 or info.emea@hds.com
Asia Pacific: +852 3189 7900 or hds.marketing.apac@hds.com
tolerance for data loss, VSP G1000 and
SVOS provide always-on operations. They
offer zero recovery point and time objec-
tives to meet your most demanding data
protection needs.
The unified management dashboard of
VSP G1000 gives you at-a-glance visibility
into the health of your storage throughout
the enterprise. Hitachi Command Suite
provides a common management frame-
work with a unified dashboard view of
block, file and object consumers. Its pow-
erful reporting capabilities simplify service
level agreement (SLA) reporting for storage
across your entire organization.
Accelerate Innovation and
Productivity
Open technology is crucial to the enter-
prise today. The data center must be as
nimble and as innovative as any other area
within the organization in order to stay
competitive. Information infrastructure limi-
tations stifle innovation and flexibility. VSP
G1000 gives you the freedom to manage
your storage assets, boosting productivity
without impacting response time for your
mission-critical applications. With plug
and play virtualization that manages exter-
nal storage as internal capacity, SVOS
reduces the overhead needed to allocate
storage for new applications and services,
boosting productivity and agility.
While competing storage systems use pro-
prietary file systems that lock you in to their
storage solution and raise exit barriers,
openness is a key pillar of VSP G1000.
With VSP G1000, you can procure and
manage multi-vendor storage across your
enterprise without adding management
complexity or risking costly vendor lock-in.
In addition, the powerful reporting capabili-
ties of Hitachi Command Suite give you
the information you need to perform effec-
tive capacity planning. With VSP G1000,
you can transform your data center into a
center for enterprise innovation.
Summary: Make What You
Do Matter More
When you turn to storage virtualization to
help take control of your operating cost,
you need a trustworthy and scalable stor-
age system to deliver on the full promise
of virtualization. With so many virtualized
storage offerings available, it’s important
to understand the capabilities that pro-
vide the highest value for your unique
requirements.
Hitachi Storage Virtualizaiton Operating
System delivers a trusted storage virtual-
ization platform with features unmatched
in the industry. With a centralized manage-
ment interface for all your storage, local
and remote, you can manage all your stor-
age more efficiently and lower operating
expenses through consolidation. Hitachi
Virtual Storage Platform G1000 provides a
single platform for all your storage needs. It
helps you to improve your return on exist-
ing storage assets and scale your storage
to meet your business needs.
VSP G1000 reduces the risk to your
enterprise data with its unique data protec-
tion features. And it delivers features like
deduplication without the worry of vendor
lock-in. With SVOS, you’ll know that with
the most mature storage virtualization
platform in the industry, you can focus less
on managing storage and more on driving
your business.
 With Hitachi VSP
G1000, you can transform
your data center into
a center for enterprise
innovation. 
1
Separately licensed feature available after initial release. Ask your HDS representative or partner for more information.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Competitive Comparison Guide

  • 1.
    Hitachi Virtual StoragePlatform G1000 Comparative Guide Primary Comparative guide helps identify requirements and accelerate business goals Many organizations are turning to storage virtualization to address the challenges they face in managing storage and enabling greater IT agility. But many storage virtualization products don’t live up to the promise, causing IT to spend more time managing a diverse array of storage products. A storage virtualization platform that offers mature virtualization capabilities allows IT to meet today’s challenges with an always-available, agile and automated foundation for a trusted Continuous Cloud Infrastructure. Virtualized storage platforms vary drastically from company to company, often forcing businesses to make tradeoffs between cost, performance and efficiency. We developed this comparative guide to help IT executives understand the current virtual- ized storage landscape. By comparing the benefits of various offerings, you can easily identify a solu- tion that will meet your current and future storage requirements. COMPARATIVEGUIDE ORM VIRTUALIZATION ECONOMICS INNOVATE D INFORMATION GLOBAL CHANGE INTELLIGENT TECHNOL SIGHT OPPORTUNITY SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE INTEGRA FLEXIBILITY Choose the Best Storage Virtualization Platform for Your Enterprise IT decision-makers face multiple challenges in managing enterprise storage today. Storage needs continue to grow and new types of business-critical applications demand consistent response times, more scalability and no down- time. Often, today’s data centers house infra- structure silos built around specific business applications or technologies. These data silos limit IT agility and the ability to meet the new demands of the business.
  • 2.
    COMPARATIVE GUIDE Comparative Overview ofStorage Virtualization Platforms This Comparative Guide illustrates the strength of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 (VSP G1000) and Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) relative to currently available enterprise storage virtualization platforms. Based on value, data growth, risk and innovation, VSP G1000 and SVOS offer clear IT and business advantages (see Table 1). You no longer need to compro- mise between enterprise functionality and midrange value. The advantages of VSP G1000 include: ■■ 1.9x more drives per chassis to increase storage density and reduce energy costs. ■■ 50% less administrative effort to save time and improve productivity. ■■ 100% availability guarantee to lower risk and ensure data availability. ■■ 90% less refresh effort to accelerate innovation and business productivity.  Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 and Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System deliver enterprise- class storage virtualization. Together, they help you to manage more data more efficiently, at higher performance and service levels with a lower operating cost. TABLE 1. OVERVIEW COMPARISON OF ENTERPRISE-CLASS STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION OFFERINGS Storage Virtualization Offerings Features Hitachi Global IBM® San EMC VMAX EMC Virtualization Volume Federated VPLEX Capability Controller Tiered Storage ■■ Enterprise scalability (block/file performance and connectivity) Reduce operating costs, increase value ■■ Integrated resilient active-active data center support ■■ Single multivendor management interface with local and remote replication support up to 3 data centers ■■ Low environmental requirement ■■ Protect quality of service with competing workload ■■ Nondisruptive firmware update without quality of service impact ■■ Self-service nondisruptive technology refresh support with GUI workflow ■■ Unified file, block and object data ■■ Replicated LUN migration support on any type of volume ■■ Plug-and-play virtualization without file system lock-in ■■ File capacity efficiency support without quality of service impact ■■ Discover block and file configurations ■■ Storage features that extend to external storage with existing data ■■ Consolidated file and block management dashboard Reduce risk, maximize availability ACCELERATE innovation and productivity Increased return on existing assets ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✔ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖
  • 3.
    3 Reduce Operating Costs, IncreaseValue The data center of today is expensive to manage and maintain, and administrative overhead reduces the value that IT can deliver to the business. As reliance on technology for business-critical applications grows, IT must deliver more value, support a new breed of applications at cloud scale, and do so without increasing budgets. VSP G1000 and SVOS reduce IT overhead, simplifiy storage management, and reach new levels of scalability throughout the enterprise with global storage virtualization unmatched by any vendor. Within a single management interface, VSP G1000 enables enterprise scalability through the industry’s highest performance hardware for improved application response time and improved connectivity. Without the connectivity limitations of other vendors’ storage virtualization solutions. You can increase virtual machine density to new levels, reducing the costs of managing different storage systems separately. VSP G1000 gives you cost-saving efficiency by simplifying your storage man- agement process. Where other vendors leave you managing multiple systems, VSP G1000 offers a single solution for manag- ing heterogeneous multivendor storage, independent of connectivity, location, stor- age system or vendor. When combined with remote data replication support, VSP G1000 allows you to create new storage system and data center extensibility: You can provision and manage virtual storage machines with active-active volumes up to 100km apart1 . Simplified storage management with the VSP G1000 means that your IT staff can do less work to maintain interoperability between technology layers. Business con- tinuity and disaster recovery processes become more efficient as well, allowing you to lower costs by having each admin- istrator manage more terabytes of storage. Furthermore, VSP G1000 lets you reach new levels of storage consolidation, con- serving energy and reducing your data center footprint. It holds up to 1.9 times more drives per chassis than competing solutions. With data center costs reach- ing as high as US$40,000 per square foot per year to operate, VSP G1000 delivers www.HDS.com/innovate Innovation is the engine of change, and information is its fuel. Innovate intelligently to lead your market, grow your company, and change the world. Manage your information with Hitachi Data Systems. important space savings. By consolidating file, block and object storage natively on a single system with VSP G1000, you will lower your operating expenses and energy costs. Increase Return on Existing Assets With ever-increasing data growth driven by factors inside and outside the business, along with tighter IT budgets, you need ways to get the most value from your current storage assets. VSP G1000 and SVOS maximize your return on your storage investment. Together, they allow you to manage and extend the life of your existing storage and consolidate all of your data into a single, virtualized platform. With native quality of service QoS management and active-active support of VSP G1000, your storage can handle higher application and virtual machine density per system than competing storage platforms. Many organizations struggle with various infrastructure silos, creating storage shortages in 1 silo, while leaving excess capacity stranded in another. VSP G1000 solves this problem with a platform for aggregating all file, block and object storage services, including multivendor storage resources, into a single pool of enterprise storage capacity. You can also improve capacity utilization by integrating active data, archiving and NAS services in a single platform, all managed from a single place. And while competing systems treat all data equally, VSP G1000 allows you to prioritize workloads to improve concurrency while maintaining high storage density. With support for active- active volumes up to 100km apart, you can benefit from increased storage density without additional risk exposure. Upgrades and refreshes to the storage system can be difficult, too. Your business- critical applications need to run with no disruption, but online firmware upgrades and storage system refreshes from other vendors can have a significant impact on workload. VSP G1000 gives you the tools you need to make sure that when upgrades and refreshes happen, your business- critical applications aren’t impacted. It allows you to refresh your technology with up to 90% less effort than competing alternatives. And VSP G1000 provides features like deduplication without impacting throughput and response time for your business-critical applications, ensuring maximum productivity. Reduce Risk, Maximize Availability Not only do you face massive data growth, but you face an increasingly complex set of requirements to limit data loss. As reli- ance on technology to run the business continues to grow, so do the risks to stor- age. Outages cause costly downtime and have a negative impact on your brand. Outages and data loss can also have costly legal and compliance ramifications as well. And as storage architecture has grown more complex, you need to main- tain the integrity of transactions across many application tiers. With so many demands, it’s clear that data protection is more critical than ever before. A solid data protection system allows you to mitigate the risks associated with a complex storage architecture. You can deliver better customer service, and address compliance requirements from inside and outside the organization. VSP G1000 has a proven and trusted technology track record. It is the only enterprise platform backed by a 100% data availability, a guarantee you can’t find with any competing vendor. With VSP G1000, data protection is main- tained for both local and remote data, a level of protection competing platforms cannot offer. As recovery point objec- tives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) become shorter, reflecting less DOWNLOAD Take The First Step. Build Your Future.
  • 4.
    © Hitachi DataSystems Corporation 2014. All rights reserved. HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. Innovate With Information is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names are properties of their respective owners. Notice: This document is for informational purposes only, and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied, concerning any equipment or service offered or to be offered by Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. BR-10072 MC April 2014 Corporate Headquarters 2845 Lafayette Street Santa Clara, CA 95050-2639 USA www.HDS.com community.HDS.com Regional Contact Information Americas: +1 408 970 1000 or info@hds.com Europe, Middle East and Africa: +44 (0) 1753 618000 or info.emea@hds.com Asia Pacific: +852 3189 7900 or hds.marketing.apac@hds.com tolerance for data loss, VSP G1000 and SVOS provide always-on operations. They offer zero recovery point and time objec- tives to meet your most demanding data protection needs. The unified management dashboard of VSP G1000 gives you at-a-glance visibility into the health of your storage throughout the enterprise. Hitachi Command Suite provides a common management frame- work with a unified dashboard view of block, file and object consumers. Its pow- erful reporting capabilities simplify service level agreement (SLA) reporting for storage across your entire organization. Accelerate Innovation and Productivity Open technology is crucial to the enter- prise today. The data center must be as nimble and as innovative as any other area within the organization in order to stay competitive. Information infrastructure limi- tations stifle innovation and flexibility. VSP G1000 gives you the freedom to manage your storage assets, boosting productivity without impacting response time for your mission-critical applications. With plug and play virtualization that manages exter- nal storage as internal capacity, SVOS reduces the overhead needed to allocate storage for new applications and services, boosting productivity and agility. While competing storage systems use pro- prietary file systems that lock you in to their storage solution and raise exit barriers, openness is a key pillar of VSP G1000. With VSP G1000, you can procure and manage multi-vendor storage across your enterprise without adding management complexity or risking costly vendor lock-in. In addition, the powerful reporting capabili- ties of Hitachi Command Suite give you the information you need to perform effec- tive capacity planning. With VSP G1000, you can transform your data center into a center for enterprise innovation. Summary: Make What You Do Matter More When you turn to storage virtualization to help take control of your operating cost, you need a trustworthy and scalable stor- age system to deliver on the full promise of virtualization. With so many virtualized storage offerings available, it’s important to understand the capabilities that pro- vide the highest value for your unique requirements. Hitachi Storage Virtualizaiton Operating System delivers a trusted storage virtual- ization platform with features unmatched in the industry. With a centralized manage- ment interface for all your storage, local and remote, you can manage all your stor- age more efficiently and lower operating expenses through consolidation. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 provides a single platform for all your storage needs. It helps you to improve your return on exist- ing storage assets and scale your storage to meet your business needs. VSP G1000 reduces the risk to your enterprise data with its unique data protec- tion features. And it delivers features like deduplication without the worry of vendor lock-in. With SVOS, you’ll know that with the most mature storage virtualization platform in the industry, you can focus less on managing storage and more on driving your business.  With Hitachi VSP G1000, you can transform your data center into a center for enterprise innovation. 1 Separately licensed feature available after initial release. Ask your HDS representative or partner for more information.