Hitachi Vantara's new VSP 5600 hits 33 million IOPS

Hitachi Vantara has expanded its storage portfolio with new Virtual Storage Platform 5000 models that dramatically speed up throughout and performance and added new storage options to its E-Series platform. The storage vendor, which unveiled the products Tuesday at its digital infrastructure event, also said it wants to help simplify customer storage management.

Hitachi added the Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5600 and 5200 to its enterprise flagship storage platform. The new arrays still have end-to-end NVMe but now provide a 42% improvement in data reduction efficiency, according to Hitachi. The vendor also introduced new features for its 5000 models, including data-in-place upgrades, and new cloud and container integrations to its E Series.

Hitachi executives highlighted the VSP 5600's ability to deliver 33 million IOPS at 39 microseconds of latency during a briefing.

"If you have extremely demanding analytics workloads or mission-critical workloads, you can rest assured that this thing can very easily tackle them and then some," said Radhika Krishnan, chief product officer at Hitachi.

Eric Burgener, an analyst at IDC, agreed that the VSP 5600's performance of 33 million IOPS is "a pretty impressive number," adding that it's the highest throughput he's seen for a single array in the open systems arena.

While the high throughput gives Hitachi some "bragging rights," Burgener said the vendor may also be capitalizing on a recent trend: consolidation. As customers refresh their existing storage infrastructure, they are looking to limit the number of platforms they use and the number of vendors they work with, he said.

"If you're going to take workloads off two or three systems and move them on to one system, you need the performance. You need to make sure that it's got higher availability," Burgener said. "One can make an argument that you can't consolidate workloads any more densely on anything other than this Hitachi system."

Krishnan agreed that the high throughput can be used by customers to consolidate several storage workloads onto one VSP 5600 platform.

"We have what we refer to as 'automatic data reduction technology,'" she said. "If you think of it as application compression, as a very clever patented technology sitting behind it. And what we're now able to deliver as a 42% improvement in that data reduction."

Along with the upgrade in performance, the VSP 5600 comes with a maximum raw internal capacity of 69.3 petabytes, which could manage more customer workloads per array.