VSP G1000 in VMware Environments
Hitachi has been in the vanguard of vendors offering enterprise-scale, storage system virtualization for the last ten years. With the announcement of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1000, Hitachi now adds global storage virtualization—the ability to virtualize across metro and (later) remote distances to its virtual storage platform.
Global storage virtualization extends virtualized storage services across multiple sites and disparate, heterogeneous physical storage systems under the control of VSP G1000. A key enabler is the introduction of active-active stretched cluster technology for storage systems that underpins a significant feature introduced with VSP G1000—global active device. We believe this will be of particular value in VMware environments where administrators still hesitate to virtualize critical business applications over a concern for their ability to maintain continuous application availability.
In an earlier research, the Evaluator Group has noted that previous versions of VSP offer significant performance and capacity scaling from a single controller image that can automatically balance workloads across virtual machines. Hitachi Device Manager can be integrated with VMware vCenter to monitor and manage entire I/O paths between individual VMs and VSP storage that can include the attachment of third party arrays. It also maps correlations between ESX servers, VMs, data stores and volumes.
For performance in business-critical VMware environments, Hitachi’s symmetric active-active controller technology distributes paths across all controllers, eliminating the risk of application degradation due to thrashing. In addition, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) provides wide striping, allowing distribution of load across all devices and dynamic performance and capacity expansion as devices are added to disk pools.
Here we review the highlights of the VSP G1000 announcement and then examine in more detail the Hitachi implementation of active-active stretched clusters for virtualized storage controllers.
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