HDS Unveils Hitachi Accelerated Flash Storage

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has unveiled Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage. This new flash module is built specifically for the most demanding enterprise-class workloads. Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage features a custom-designed, rack-optimised form factor and innovative flash memory controller technology from Hitachi, Ltd. These features let the module achieve higher performance, lower cost per bit and greater capacity compared to conventional solid-state drives (SSDs) on the market today. Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is available now for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is the first product to incorporate the recently introduced flash memory controller from Hitachi, Ltd.

“Today’s announcement is a milestone achievement in how flash technology will be used in the enterprise datacentre moving forward,” said Roberto Basilio, Vice President, Infrastructure Platforms Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is the first flash device that is optimised for the performance and reliability required for mission-critical applications. These applications include OLTP databases, ERP, financial data management, metadata and indexing. Because of the innovative multi-core flash controller technology from Hitachi, we are able to use multi-level cell (MLC) flash in enterprise applications by extending MLC endurance and exceeding the performance of single-level cell (SLC) flash. The result is the lowest cost per bit of any enterprise MLC flash solution on the market today.”

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Flash technology has become more pervasive in the datacentre over the past few years. However, its widespread adoption as a mainstream storage option has been hampered by high costs, limited endurance and sub-optimal write performance. IT organisations have been forced to make tradeoffs in performance and capacity to reach the cost points that their shrinking budgets can accommodate. Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage fundamentally changes this model by eliminating these tradeoffs and answering customer demands for high capacity and performance at the lowest cost per bit. It changes the model by leveraging advanced Hitachi controller technology to increase the performance of MLC flash to levels that exceed those of more costly SLC flash. It also extends MLC flash endurance to enterprise levels. Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage delivers the performance, cost points, capacity and environmental characteristics that customers desire and that alternative solid-state storage options cannot match.

Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage introduces several unique capabilities including inline write compression that speeds writes on flash and improves MLC flash memory endurance. When compared to 400GB MLC SSDs, Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage features better performance, improved environmental characteristics (power and space), and up to 46 percent lower cost per bit. To provide customers with even more capacity cost savings, Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage is fully compatible with all Hitachi VSP features, including Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT). This capability lets the system automatically optimise data placement by putting the most active data on Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage when the highest performance is required, and placing less-active data on cost-optimised, lower performance disk.

Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage fits into a new 8U flash chassis. Each enclosure can scale from 6.4TB up to 76.8TB of flash storage, giving it 2 times greater density than the largest MLC SSD available today. Up to 4 flash enclosures can be housed in Hitachi VSP, enabling more than 300TB of flash per system. This deployment gives existing Hitachi VSP customers the flexibility to architect cost-effective, tiered storage environments with HDT that address the most demanding performance workloads. Customers can do this while maintaining the same storage management environment, external storage virtualisation support, superior uptime and advanced functionality they are accustomed to from Hitachi VSP.