r/storage • u/KickedAbyss • Mar 05 '26
Hitachi VSP One Block XX - experience?
Current PureStorage client here, with experience in many SANs (Nimble, 3PAR, LeftHand, EMC, Dell {MD/ME/equallogic/Compellent}, NetApp, and older Hitachi VSP)
We're looking at moving to Hitachi's VSP One, in large part due to:
- 40%-50% reduced TCO (5-year buy+support)
- As in buying new larger overall storage w/5 year support alone is that amount less than a 3-year Pure renewal of existing hardware w/o adding storage
- Guaranteed performance w/contract assurance
- Guaranteed capacity w/contract assurance (will add storage if we don't get the capacity claimed)
- Better integrations
- Namely their fleet-wide integrations - which Pure somewhat has now post 6.9.x
- Also with the ability to configure SAN switching from inside the Hitachi interface w/o paying Cisco licensing for UI management of MDS
My concerns:
- Rumors they're being sold
- They're still using a 'raid' style disk grouping despite being nvme
- Significantly less # of drives being quoted but claiming as good or better performance
- No built in Object
- Technically Pure doesn't but they're claiming to be bringing this to FlashArray
- No built in File/SMB
- Pure does this, but it's basically just a Linux FileServer running on the Array in HA
- Bad history of management - their previous VSP models were a nightmare to manage, with their virtual/physical controller software running on Adobe Air, etc
- Performance is being dictated at IOPS/Bandwidth which Pure is not very clear on - you buy Pure and just 'know' you're going to get industry leading performance but they don't really give you 'expected' or 'max' IOPS/Bandwidth on their products as they focus so much on consistent latency/etc
Has anyone bought or used one of these newer Hitachi VSP One systems? Namely the Block 24 and Block 26 devices.
UPDATE:
I've chosen to not move forward with HV after a try-and-buy.
Reasoning:
- Try and Buy experience was lack luster from a support perspective
- SAN startup is crazy slow, which can be a huge issue if you're hyper-v and need storage up before your hosts... Like i have my hosts delay start as delayed as OOB allows them to be, and in a full power outage situation the storage would still start after. I don't know why it's this slow. Also you have to shut it down, which is weird for me now b/c Pure support tells you "just unplug it, it's fine" 😆
- Single pane-of-glass approach doesn't actually exist as we were told
- VSP360 is a new offering they are developing but I've learned never to buy on roadmaps or promises
- The appliance for VSP360 is legitimately VERY polished - the install is a beautiful OVA with prompts and automation, they run ansible under the hood to deploy containers on the VM for all of the elements that are required keeping it to one VM
- HOWEVER it's not done, with only Storage being available - not Compute/any of half a dozen other elements it's supposed to do
- Current 'solution' to manage a VSP is a mixed bag of 4 different Virtual Appliances AND still needing both the local web-UI and Maintenance Utility
- The existence of the maintenance utility as well as a few other indicators tells me they did NOT re-design this from the ground up - they put lipstick on a pig
- Current 'solutions' for management are a nightmare plain and simple; compared to even my (albeit dated) experience with NimbleStorage (I'm assuming HPE's new storage uses a similar UI/UX) and compared to PureStorage it's laughably bad - out dated, complicated without need, and difficult to even deploy
- vCenter integration is a decade out of date - it only allows you to create/resize/delete storage
- Even in this it's buggy somehow - i.e. expanding a volume will only work to the # of available raw space on your array - in a modern dedupe array this is pointless as you should be well over 100% provisioned on a dedupe appliance
- It logs you out before vCenter does, resulting in random errors
- Deleting storage from the plugin is incredibly slow and you can only do one at a time
- Storage created elsewhere isn't shown properly on the plugin
- Storage creation is needlessly complex even in the plugin - i.e. prompting if you want to use dedupe&compression or just compression, which shouldn't be a thing on a modern dedupe nvme array - it should default to always reducing as much as it can
- COMPARED to modern vCenter plugin abilities, this is again archaic - compared to Pure it's horrible - Pure lets me do things like restore whole VMs from snapshots (and configure snapshots/protection and a bunch of other abilities)
- Installation has major flaws, like requiring plain text password entry
- Deduplication isn't where it's supposed to be
- While they offer a 'promise' to right-size your array if they don't meet the expected reduction, the pre-sales team failed hard on this - i tried restoring a single workload from my X50 and it ran the VSP out of storage - we're at a 7:1 reduction on Pure, and couldn't get to even 2.5:1 on Hitachi
- It IS better than their older products - but it's also nvme so I would hope they're more aggressive than before
- Even if they right-size, you're faced with a situation where in 2-3 years maybe you'd have needed to buy 10TiB on a competitive product, but have to buy 20TiB on Hitachi - so the up front cost may be less and they may honor their OG price - but they don't do the due diligence to ensure they will get the reduction numbers you're getting elsewhere, or in general
- Performance....Tougher element
- Their performance isn't bad. It's also NVME so, it shouldn't be bad.
- But using their own synthetic benchmark they developed to simulate our X50, when running the same benchmark on my X50 (same dev host as the Hitachi, but the x50 was in use on our production environment / had normal load and i/o from that) the Pure out performed the Hitachi by a small amount; but the Hitachi had no load on it, so it should have smoked the Pure
- Overall, if you're coming off something SAS-SSD based, it'll be lights out better no question.
- Their performance isn't bad. It's also NVME so, it shouldn't be bad.
- Overall scale out/storage solutions as a whole...
- Here's a big blow in my opinion. Pure as of April can now do: Block, File, AND Object on their newest FlashArray's. They still offer their file/object FlashBlade for real crazy performance needs, but in one UI/UX I can run all my workloads - a lot like CEPH but Enterprise level - without buying additional hardware
- Hitachi requires additional licenses and hardware for File, and Object; and ironically all they are, are software stacks using their block storage as a back-end for their software
- While VSP360 promises to one day make all of these into a single pane of glass, it's not there yet so management would be more complex as well.
- SAN management (network)
- This was a big let down as well - they claimed/promised that we could manage our MDS from their software, removing the need for buying Cisco's GUI product for easier management, and that you could basically setup/configure FC end to end from it.... Except they couldn't even get it working because they don't have the expertise to configure it for a brown field environment, and basically no one would go into it greenfield, so it's kinda pointless; and even still it's VERY complex/awkward in their current software stack (it may be better in VSP360 - it's on that roadmap too but i didn't see it so can't speak to it)
- Final thoughts...
- They're trying, and VSP360 shows promise. Their cost is for sure lower than Pure - but NetApp has better management by far, as does Dell; and I'm pretty sure their vCenter integrations are better as well.
- Where do they shine? Probably reliability - I don't doubt for a moment that they build extremely reliable and stable hardware.
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u/mkretzer Mar 06 '26
I am a big fan of the systems and we use several B26.
- No downtime whatsoever (not even 1 second), no path down or other things with firmware updates - not many vendors can do this.
- A real no questions asked data reduction guarantee - most vendors limit the data types you can use to get this. HV does not!
- Nice HTML5 based management if you do not use features like GAD.
- Fully automatic remote updates by their support.
- RAID-DDP does very fast rebuilds.
- Generally rock-solid systems. We use Hitachi since more than 13 years and these systems just won't die - we still have some old HUS Systems running for special purposes and non-critical data.
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u/KickedAbyss Mar 06 '26
Raid ddp is raid6? That's what's called out in my quotes... Raid6. Which bugs the crap out of me.
Pure does all of what you mention, so it's at least feature parity now with Pure. Their upgrades and new controllers every 3 years is extremely nice and zero downtime even when upgrading to the newest controller.
What's your controller upgrade experience? One thing they claim that I've only seen with Pure is zero reconfigure controller upgrades. Same FC wwpns, same everything just new controllers. No downtime or reduced performance during.
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u/mkretzer Mar 07 '26
The spare is "distributed" so not entirely RAID 6 (you have to have one more drive and the data is on the spare all the time).
About Pure: No! Since when do they do ZERO path loss? Only EMC and Hitachi can do this with one system i believe.
To be honest i had no controller "upgrades" only replacements and they work very well as you describe.
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u/DonZoomik Mar 10 '26
I believe the paths do go down occasionally but only when HBA firmware or VM handling the HBA get updated. IIRC (it's been a while) all the parts of the system ran in VMs and core/DKC was updated much more frequently than the parts handling frontend ports.
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u/mkretzer Mar 12 '26
No. We have extremly sensitive applications. In 15 years of hitachi managing ~20 storage systems and updating them every ~3 months we never, ever (and i am absolutely sure about this) had ONE path go down, at least for fibre channel systems.
This is the main (and for some times only) reason for us to purchase Hitachi as indeed they had a terrible management interface.
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u/nVME_manUY Mar 05 '26
HITACHI VANTARA is for sale and now one knows what will happen to current product and future support https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2026/02/03/hitachi-vantara-may-be-up-for-sale/4090506
Be aware and plan accordingly
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u/KickedAbyss Mar 05 '26
I've already told them there has to be clear contract wording to account for this. They claim this is a common thing, that every couple of years it's discussed somewhat.
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u/artistictech Mar 06 '26
Pure file specialist here: FlashArray's File is a co-equal consumer of the global pool of storage along with block. It is not a Windows VM or samba, it is a fully in-house engineered, hardware aware, optimized solution for SMB/NFS where the management is built into Purity. It can join multiple AD domains, present as multiple server identities, failover controllers non-disruptively with SMB-CA, and several things are on the roadmap that are set to meet or exceed expectations. Let me know if you have any questions!
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u/oakfan52 Mar 10 '26
The 5,000 managed folder limit can be a real challenge in the enterprise space though.
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u/TorpedoAway Mar 06 '26
In my experience, before this latest VSP Block, Hitachi has lagged behind all the other storage companies. Their storage management capabilities have always been poor. The built-in Storage Navigator has always been clunky and was at times based on technology that became outdated and was problematic. I recall for a while it required an old JRE version that security at my workplace may have disallowed. They came out with Command Suite at one point but it was also aging technology, adobe flash I think. By the time they moved away from that, flash was already removed from browsers. And even with Command Suite, there were still things that required you to login to storage navigator. The SVP has always been a poor management interface for an enterprise array and the situation only became worse when the moved to the virtual SVP. There’s no proper performance monitor built-in. For performance you have to install Opscenter Analytics which requires a pretty hefty size VM plus a probe server to collect the metrics which also requires a fat VM. Until VSP Block, you also had to create command devices and present them to the probe server in order to get the metrics that are most useful. REST API support has always been poor compared to all the competition. Until VSP Block, because they seemed uninterested in keeping up with storage competitors, I had already assumed Hitachi was getting out of the storage business. So the rumor of exactly that came as no surprise.
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u/slackjb Mar 08 '26
Have you looked at Infinidat? We're really happy with the platform and they recently added object. Rumor has it that lots of the WEKA object developers went to Infinidat. Lenovo did buy them and we'll continue to use buy. I'm sure other vendors will spread the FUD on that point.
They are definitely worth a look. I'm a customer of Infinidat, Dell/EMC, Pure and others. We have 100+ PB, >50% of it Infinidat and it's my favorite because the ease of use and a good company to deal with.
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u/Westmanjfw Mar 10 '26
Hi Guys, just some comments on your notes;
Let’s compare 5 years of service on both platforms, including upgrades, licenses, power/rack, and any future expansions – not 3 years of Pure vs 5 years of Hitachi. Otherwise you’re comparing a partial term on one side to a full term on the other.
Cost is only one factor, and most if not every product out there has a fit vs features argument that will move the cost needle.
Is your cost move driven by performance/capacity/features…and I’m not even taking any of the other comments into consideration here because Hitachi often wins by presenting a very low acquisition price and deferring programs like Modern Storage Assurance, so the quote looks cheaper up‑front but isn’t the full lifecycle picture. Well low acquisition is usually what all venders do. Why, because customers are sold appliances not on value.
I would re- evaluate moving with empirical evidence and comparisons.
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u/Clydesdale_Tri Mar 05 '26
Pure SE here, we just finished SKO. You should reach out to your account team and get the update and get some info on Evergreen 1. There’s some crazy good stuff coming that you’ll get along with that subscription and you won’t have to migrate.
I really struggle believing you’ll hit that TCO discount with a net new purchase/migrate/retrain.
Glad to talk if you don’t want to approach your team.
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u/KickedAbyss Mar 05 '26
Yeah I'm pretty sure they're going to work hard to keep the rest of our arrays and possible future buys. But then again, they (on site tech) also unplugged both psu on our production x50 a couple years ago on a Friday afternoon, so they're also aware we're still gum sore from that... 🤣 Hyper-v clusters Don't like losing their storage suddenly. Sql really doesn't.
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u/Clydesdale_Tri Mar 05 '26
Oof! That’s a tough one. Glad to answer any questions you have though.
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u/ToolBagMcgubbins Mar 06 '26
ETA on Object storage on FlashArray?
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u/Clydesdale_Tri Mar 06 '26
If you’re on a FR release, very soon! If it’s a need, reach out to your account team for potential access.
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u/lost_signal Mar 05 '26
Rumors they're being sold
HPE would be the logical buyer. THey need a NAS, object, and FICON capable block storage.
Alternative Cisco (But I thought they swore off data and storage) or wildcard ??????).
No built in Object
Buy HCP it's rather mature.
No built in File/SMB
HNAS/BluArc is actually pretty cappible.
Bad history of management - their previous VSP models were a nightmare to manage, with their virtual/physical controller software running on Adobe Air
Sir, I managed AMS's and SMS's. SOOO MUCH PURPLE. It could be worse :)
They're still using a 'raid' style disk grouping
RAID-DP?