Data Transformation Success Depends on Cutting-edge Storage Solutions

The digital transformation impacting organizations globally has sparked a self-reinforcing— and progressively daunting—process. Increasingly, digital data fuels digital transformation solutions and processes. At the same time, business operations themselves are continuously generating new data that future initiatives will need to exploit.

This escalating feedback loop has already produced mind-boggling oceans of data, and there’s no end in sight. During 2018, for example, storage suppliers added more than 700 exabytes of storage capacity to the worldwide installed base, according to IDC’s Global StorageSphere report.

IDG Communications Inc.

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As virtually all business operations go digital, selecting the platforms that serve up and store data has become critical for modern data center operations.

Storage capacity worldwide will more than double from 2018 to 2023, IDC estimates, growing to 11.7 zettabytes in 2023, equivalent to 11.7 trillion gigabytes.

IT managers are under intense pressure to capitalize on these immense volumes of digital data. If properly leveraged, data can guide critical business insights, power advanced applications, and support business model innovations. Not incidentally, this data can also help IT managers play increasingly strategic roles in their organizations.

It is no surprise then that IT managers are searching for storage solutions that can meet today’s data performance, availability, reliability, and other SLA demands, without slowing advanced applications and processes. Solutions that simply provide massive storage capacities—although a necessary capability—are by no means enough.

Beyond their core functionality, data storage platforms must: be easy to deploy and manage; help companies automate labor-intensive manual tasks; and be affordable and cost effective, ideally offered under different pricing models that match different budgets and preferences.

A dynamic and challenging digital data landscape

Even as they get a handle on supporting operations and business goals, IT managers are facing a digital data tsunami. Some of this wave comes from their own computing and communications environments: corporate applications, event loggers, management systems, and cybersecurity monitors have been joined by mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and cloud-based services. Companies can also draw valuable data from new and diverse sources, such as government databases, supply-chain partners, and social media networks.

While plentiful, all this data is of little use if it can’t be served up, processed, and analyzed at the speeds required by critical business processes. For example, cutting-edge solutions that incorporate big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are both extremely data-hungry and demand real-time data feeds.

Unfortunately for IT managers, their budgets often aren’t increasing as quickly as business demands are evolving. Cost concerns include the capital expense of purchasing storage systems, as well as operational costs associated with deploying, managing, and maintaining these systems.

Layered on top of the monetary costs are oppressive time demands. Dealing with day-to-day storage management tasks can leave little time for IT managers to innovate or plan strategically.

Modern storage solutions for modern data demands

Addressing these new demands requires IT shops to take a comprehensive approach to identifying and implementing modern storage solutions.

At a base level is the storage medium itself. In recent years, all-flash solutions have emerged as a go-to platform that meets the most demanding performance and reliability demands, at increasingly cost-competitive prices.

Still, flash storage comes at a premium price compared to the price per gigabyte of high-capacity, 7200-rpm disk drives. As a result, and for the foreseeable future, many organizations will deploy hybrid mixtures of flash and hard drives within their storage arrays. This will allow them to balance the price of their storage with the service levels they must deliver.

Residing above the storage media itself are critical capabilities that can significantly differentiate one storage solution from another.

Among the most important:

• Storage virtualization features that support cloud-like operations such as self-provisioning while also maximizing storage performance, utilization, and agility;

• Management and administrative features ranging from capacity utilization monitoring to support for task automation;

• Metroclustering of multiple data centers to ensure robust business continuity;

• Symmetric active-active controller designs, which let multiple controllers access data volumes simultaneously to allow maximum resource utilization;

• Use of AI and ML technologies to provide optimal storage functionality and reliability. For example: proactively identifying and addressing potential problems, or to initiate automated management workflows.

Beyond the features and capabilities of the storage platforms themselves are vendor-specific policies that can be critical in determining which storage solutions make the most sense. One important area of differentiation is in the range of deployment and pricing options offered.

Depending on their individual budgets and preferences, some companies may want to purchase or lease storage solutions for on-premise deployments, while others will want to pursue a colocation deployment, storage-as-a-service, or a managed services model.

Another variable of growing importance to IT and business managers alike is that of data availability guarantees. Given the near-total dependence of business operations on ready access to required data, companies want assurances that their storage vendors have some skin in the game. While most vendors now offer some form of data availability guarantees, the fine print of what those policies encompass can vary considerably from supplier to supplier.

The solution: Hitachi Vantara Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has long pioneered cutting-edge storage and DataOps solutions, as evidenced by its more than 4,000 storage patents. The company’s flagship Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family has achieved significant market adoption, including deployments by more than 80% of the Fortune 100.

Powered by the Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System, the VSP family includes:

• The Hitachi VSP 5000 series, the world’s fastest NVMe flash array with capabilities that include up to 21 million IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 70-microsecond response times.

• The new Hitachi VSP E990 delivers best-in- class performance, with 5.8M IOPs and 64μs, as well as AI-driven management. It can also help you reduce manual tasks by up to 70% with workflow orchestration.

• The all-flash Hitachi VSP F series, which provides up to 4.8 million IOPS.

• The hybrid Hitachi VSP G series, which scales up to more than 17 petabytes of physical capacity and can provide either a cost-effective alternative to all-flash deployments or a transition platform to support companies on the road to an all-flash data center.

Building on a long history of powerful storage manage- ment and automation capabilities, Hitachi Vantara introduced the Hitachi Ops Center data management software along with the October 2019 debut of the Hitachi VSP 5000 series. Among its capabilities, Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer applies machine learning and an AI-based heuristic engine to telemetry metrics to monitor service levels, pinpoint potential issues, and determine the root cause of problems.

Common capabilities shared across the Hitachi VSP portfolio include everything from metroclustering to support for symmetric active-active controllers. In addition, Hitachi Vantara provides a 100% data avail- ability guarantee for all VSP models, and offers a wide range of pricing and deployment options for its products.

It’s no surprise that designing and building the ultimate driving machine requires a lot of data. With big data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, and other demands driving up data storage, speed, and availability requirements, the BMW Group turned to Hitachi Vantara for a managed storage-on-demand solution.

The two companies determined that all-flash Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1500 would best address BMW’s current and future needs. In addition to lightning-fast data access speeds, high-storage density, a small data center footprint, and low energy and cooling demands, the VSP G1500 infrastructure also ensures data consistency and fully automated failover with zero downtime for 24/7 availability.

Hitachi Vantara developed a non-disruptive migration plan to shift storage to the new infrastructure, which allowed the process to occur 30% faster than previous migrations. Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System now delivers a broad range of advanced functionality, including a global-active device capability to ensure continuous operations across multiple locations.

Hitachi Vantara Global Services proactively monitors the storage solution and reports key metrics to BMW. The managed services contract includes guaranteed service and quality levels, and allows flexible capacity adjustments to meet those SLAs even as storage demands fluctuate.

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Hitachi Vantara Takes the Wheel of a BMW Group Managed Storage Solution

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