Share your experience using Hitachi NAS Platform

We sell the Hitachi NAS Platform, and it is the best product for our customers.

I sell it to banks, telecom companies, and other enterprises at the enterprise level.

We have a cluster with Hitachi NAS Platform in a bank, and they use Global-Active Device for disaster recovery. Their RPO and RTO is basically zero, which is very important for this bank.

My experience with the Hitachi NAS Platform shows that it's the best product.

The best feature of the Hitachi NAS Platform is its scalability. The scalability is particularly valuable because for enterprise customers, when you put a short NAS, it's a problem. When they have all their data in one solution, it is simpler.

The benefit of the Hitachi NAS Platform is primarily its performance. Banks and telcos need extremely high performance, and there are no other NAS in the current market that can compete with Hitachi in terms of performance. The disaster recovery implementation we have is also very important, especially for the banks, as they are currently experiencing changes in how they provide services.

For the Hitachi NAS Platform, the tools are basic and don't provide much insight.

They can continue to improve the interface to keep it up-to-date, and maybe add some new features or better ways of controlling it, though overall, it's a very good solution.

I've been in the industry for more than 20 years.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate their support an eight. It's good support; sometimes they take a bit to answer, but normally they are quick.

Positive

The setup is straightforward. You install the hardware, go to the GUI, and connect the storage. You can set all the EVS and file systems; it's pretty straightforward with no complex steps.

Availability is also valuable, but the price is high, though it's worth the price.

My clients use the tiered storage. When there is productive data, it goes in tier one, and copy data goes in tier three or four.

Data deduplication in the Hitachi NAS Platform decreases the storage needs for our customers with a ratio of two-to-one or three-to-one.

In the new Hitachi NAS Platform, the interface shows performance metrics and all the information that was not shown before, which was the main pain point for the old NAS.

I would rate Hitachi NAS Platform a nine out of ten. In terms of performance, it's the best. There are no other NAS as strong, big, and scalable as Hitachi implementation. That flexibility is what big enterprises are looking for, and while the interface was the main problem, it is now fixed.

We are using Hitachi NAS Platform in conjunction with NetApp, Fujitsu, and other server and storage solutions. These solutions are deployed for our storage and software solution needs.

The Hitachi NAS Platform is sold with Hitachi SAN. It provides Network Attached Storage (NAS) protocols on top of the existing SAN infrastructure. It creates a NAS environment on top of Hitachi SAN, which facilitates customers who need NAS protocols along with their existing SAN portfolio.

I would suggest that Hitachi make a NAS box that can work independently, without relying on SAN connectivity. The current solution only suits customers who already have a Hitachi SAN environment and want to add NAS protocols like NFS and CIFS. 

It's not suitable for customers without an existing SAN, as they would first need to acquire the SAN infrastructure before adding NAS functionality.

We have been dealing with Hitachi for almost one decade.

The Hitachi storage platform is highly scalable and highly available. However, the scalability of the NAS environment is limited since it is dependent on the SAN's scalability. A NAS environment requires a conjunction of two devices: the SAN box and filers attached together. Therefore, the scalability of the NAS directly depends on the scalability of the SAN.

The pricing for the Hitachi NAS is higher compared to other NAS solutions since the NAS protocol is provided on top of the existing SAN environment, requiring an additional device for NAS functionality. This makes it very costly and sometimes not appropriate.

I recommend considering NetApp for a unified storage solution or Dell EMC for a cost-effective solution. NetApp is well-suited for SAN and NAS requirements with better features and is cost-effective. Dell EMC may be a better choice in terms of cost yet lacks some feature sets compared to NetApp.

The Hitachi NAS Platform is too complicated, not simple, and not cost-effective, sometimes being inappropriate for most situations. 

I would not recommend it, as it's a costly feature addon rather than a standalone solution. 

I would rate the Hitachi NAS functionality as five out of ten. 

NetApp is recommended for a unified solution with richer features and scalability, especially for those needing ransomware protection, data availability guarantee, and data loss protection.