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. * 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.