If it seems that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is a little
behind the curve in delivering SSDs to the enterprise data center,
well, you'd be correct. Most of the other storage system makers have
had them available as options to replace hard disk drives for months
and/or even a few years.
But Hitachi moves a little more slowly, and there are reasons for that.
The company has always moved very deliberately -- some critics say too
deliberately -- when introducing a new product or service because it
requires more testing and quality assurance than most other companies.
Nonetheless, Hitachi GTS Nov. 16 moved into the solid-state age by
introducing the Ultrastar SSD400S product line, its first SSDs for
enterprise systems.
The new drives, developed in a partnership with Intel/Micron, come in
100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities with a choice of 2.5-inch 6Gbit/sec
SAS (serial-attached SCSI) or 3.5-inch 4G bps Fibre Channel
interfaces.
The SSDs are powered by Intel/Micron's 34-nm, SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash memory.
Naturally, the new drives' main attraction is their high I/O
performance. Hitachi claims the new SSDs will reach up to 535M bps
sequential read and 500M bps write rate on the SAS interface and up to
390M bps read and 340M bps write rates using Fibre Channel.
"There's a general belief in the IT industry that the enterprise-level
SSDs won't really begin to take off in volume until the hard-drive guys
begin to offer such [enterprise-level] products," Hitachi Vice
President of Product Marketing Brendan Collins told eWEEK.
Of course, Seagate, WD, Samsung, Fusion i-o, Pliant, Nimbus, Schooner
and several other companies already offer enterprise-level SSD drives
and/or complete systems and have made them available for some time.
But Collins said many established companies with large data centers
want to see an established system vendor making these available to fit
into existing IT systems, so not a lot of rework has to be done.
"The big storage-systems vendors are very eager to see this first
product that we're announcing," Collins said. "When we look at the
market, we're announcing products that target legacy Fibre Channel
systems, so we need to have 3.5-inch, 4Gb FC solution for that [older]
market, and we also have to have a 2.5-inch SAS 6Gb, dual port solution
for a lot of the newer systems," he said.
"Both of these are compatible with one another. They are also
compatible with our existing [spinning disk] hard drive SAS and FC, as
well as all of our high-capacity SATA stuff, because they're all
designed off the same ASIC and firmware."
Interoperability is a key factor
Interoperability in the data center is one of Hitachi's biggest selling
points, Collins said, because being able to drop an SSD in place of a
hard drive with little or no fuss allows IT managers and CIOs to
protect their software investments.
"What the big OEMs are saying to us is, 'Look, we've spent the last 20
years developing our file system and our software RAID stack.' That's
their value-add," Collins said. "Our hard drives -- Fibre Channel, SAS
and SATA -- have been optimized to integrate seamlessly into that
environment.
"If you come along with an independent SSD [for SAS or FC], typically
the big storage OEMs won't take them seriously because they don't have
the SCSI protocol knowledge. There is only a handful of guys out there
today that have that capability, and they're the hard-drive guys."
Collins said the new UltraStar drives can take petabytes of data
written to them and are guaranteed for five years. Hitachi specifies up
to 35PB of random writes for the 400GB drive, Collins said, with the
100GB drive taking up to 9PB in its lifetime.
The new drives will be sold exclusively through channel partners,
Collins said. Hitachi did not disclose pricing details; the drives will
become available in volume in the first half of 2011.
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