HDS has announced their long awaited evolution of USP arrays: the VSP (or you can call it P9500 in the HP flavored version).
As you can imagine there are already a lot of comments out of there from journalists, bloggers (hereand here), analysts and, of course, competitors. I don’t want to add another review here because it’s superfluous but I just want to point out some facts:
Hitachi dynamic tiering
Yes, finally automated tiered storage is here too!!! HDS added this feature to its enterprise platform but, at the moment, not to its Modular line! I’m very curious to know more about it.
SAS and 2,5″ HDDs
SAS and 2,5″ HDDs in the backend for an enterprise class array? SAS is cheaper than FC and 2,5″s are denser, more reliable and faster than their 3,5 parents. Good!
Very scalable architecture
You can scale up and out to reach a huge amount of storage managed as a single image. It’s an interesting evolution that I can call a “new monolithic+modular design”. Obviously, it’s not cheap, but, who cares?
Management software
HDS is well-known in the storage industry for the quality of their hardware and even more for their crappy software. Part of the announcement is about a new version of their management software that should be more usable than its predecessors (but the first comments out there say that some work has still to be done).
My point of view
Well, it seems a pretty good evolution but I’m not persuaded yet. Are you ready to spend other Millions to store your Virtual Machines???
Every day I meet customers and they want to run away from T1 arrays, especially when virtualized environments are involved. Even important customers with hundreds or thousands of VMs are moving from old Monolithic arrays to next generation arrays to lower the costs and improve management.
This is why I don’t think VSP is the right choice for the majority of the companies. On the other hand, I think that next generation storages makes the difference because they have all the features mentioned above and much more for a fraction of the price and a better TCO!!!
