Hitachi Vantara has announced general availability for an initial set of product offerings under the new VSP One brand.  Initially this means VSP One SDS Block, SDS Cloud and File solutions.  What exactly is the strategy here?

Background

In November 2023 we covered the initial announcement of VSP One, a plan to restructure the storage assets of Hitachi Vantara.  At the same time, the company had announced internal restructuring to refocus the business on core storage solutions.  You can read more on these announcements and changes in this research note.

The first set of products under the VSP One family has now been announced, with General Availability from 16^th April 2024.  These are:

• VSP One SDS Block (On-premises)
• VSP One SDS Cloud (AWS Marketplace)
• VSP One File (On-premises)

VSP One SDS

The VSP One SDS offering is based on the SVOS operating system that now powers Hitachi storage solutions.  Customers can choose an on-premises version, which will initially be certified for Dell and HPE hardware (although other hardware vendors can also be used).  The public cloud instantiation runs on AWS and is currently available in the AWS Marketplace.

We don’t have many details of VSP One SDS at this stage.  However, the marketplace details show the requirements scale from three EC2 to 18 EC2 instances and a maximum of 1.9PB of storage capacity.  Features such as compression require the use of specific instance types (R6i.8xlarge with 256GB memory) to get the computing power needed to deliver these capabilities. Don’t expect this storage option to be cheap – Hitachi quotes estimated costs at $16,252/month with 6x R6i.8xlarge virtual instances (which we presume includes licensing and EC2 storage).

VSP One File

VSP One File is based on the HNAS architecture that was originally derived from the 2011 acquisition of BlueArc. This solution uses FPGA acceleration cards and, as a result, is currently offered as an on-premises solution only. The question to ask on the unstructured offerings is when VSP One File will be offered in the public cloud and how the FPGA functionality will be replaced. We’re also interested to see how HCP will evolve and integrate into the new solutions (VSP One Object is due in 2025).

Alignment

Part of the VSP One transformation is the ability to offer consistent services.  As a result, the three GA VSP One products all come with Hitachi Vantara’s 100% Data Availability Guarantee, Effective Capacity Guarantee and a feature called Modern Storage Assurance.  The latter (which can be found here) is aimed at operational simplification, a much-needed aspect we will discuss in a moment. 

The Architect’s View®

Without some additional “hands-on” with these new platforms, it is currently hard to say precisely what has changed and what is new within each solution.  However, during our briefing on the VSP One announcement, it is clear that VSP One SDS has moved on from the hardware-focused technology of the early 2010s.  This, for example, includes simpler more efficient RAID (erasure coding at 8K granularity).  We will cover the technical aspects of the new solutions later in the year around the June timeframe, following more in-depth research.

For now, we can make some initial observations on the direction of travel.  Firstly, we already know about the Hitachi Vantara reorganisation (see the Research Note discussed at the top of this post).  Secondly, Hitachi hired former NetApp SVP Octavian Tanase in January 2024 into the position of Chief Product Officer.  Previously, Tanase was SVP of Hybrid Cloud Engineering and ONTAP at NetApp.

Over recent years, the NetApp playbook has focused on a single multi-protocol platform (ONTAP) available everywhere (on-premises, cloud, edge) with native integration into the public cloud.  The cloud model worked well for NetApp as the only vendor offering a native solution.  However, as we’ve recently reported, growth seems to have stalled.

We can start to see parallels to the NetApp strategy within the Hitachi Vantara business as VSP One evolves into a single platform offering structured and unstructured data services.  Correspondingly, Hitachi Vantara has simplified its product portfolio by reducing its dependence on heavily engineered bespoke hardware.  SVOS is the logical evolution of that strategy, although we don’t believe that HNAS and SVOS have yet been integrated into a single storage platform like ONTAP.

Exactly how long an entire transformation of the portfolio will take is not yet clear.  However, Hitachi is committed to bringing customers on the journey, so we can anticipate at least a five-year timespan. 

The table stakes for modern primary storage have changed significantly since the VSP One and its predecessors arrived on the market.  As we discuss in our Market Perspective, “Essential Features of Primary Storage Systems 2024”, customers are much more interested in aspects such as fleet management and cyber resiliency, expecting 100% availability and high performance to be the norm.

---

---

Hitachi Vantara needs to demonstrate the table stakes features while meeting modern requirements.  This is an area we will dig into in more detail, following additional briefings from Hitachi in June 2024.  In the meantime, you can read more on the background of the company and its products in our Hitachi Vantara X-Ray. 

---

---

Copyright (c) 2007-2024 – Post #fa22 – Brookend Limited, first published on https://www.architecting.it/blog, do not reproduce without permission.