Hitachi NAS Reviews

I work as a senior IT consultant providing objective consultancy services to my customers. 

The reliability of the product is its best feature. The simplicity of the solution is also something that I appreciate.  

The solution could be improved if they would provide information on the agility of their products, and the scaling of it in order to increase the power of its capacity so you could know whether it needs different configuration. This issue exists in many products, it's not specific to Hitachi. The monitoring tool is not well developed and my guess is that the companies are not investing too much money in this area. 

An additional feature that would be helpful would be the ability to increase and decrease the size of the file system dynamically and easily. Right now that's not the case. The Hitachi snapshot technique is of course less powerful than the competition is offering in many ways, so it would be better to resolve this.

I've been using this solution for many years. 

My experience with the technical support has been good. 

I currently work with NetApp as well. It's a more flexible and more popular solution. The NAS system and technology has some basic limitations that have nothing to do with the manufacturer. 

The cost depends on your ability to negotiate and the ability to understand your needs. As a consultant assisting customers, I get them to define their needs clearly in a way that enables a comparison of solutions that allows for a comparison in price. 

You will never find a solution that fits all because every company has different requirements and every company will need to compromise. This is a good product overall.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are a system integrator and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It is a mass storage system.

An example of one use case that has been deployed is a CIFS solution in a home directory environment. We have also implemented it as part of a media server solution.

The most valuable feature is its ability to handle a high number of users while maintaining both stability and performance. For example, with more than 100,000 users, the performance is stable. With some other NAS products, as the number of users increases, the performance decreases.

We would like to have a more economical version of this solution that is suitable for use with a mid-range scale, such as one that can handle between 35,000 and 50,000 users.

The manageability needs to be improved, as the interface for doing so is not that great.

I would like to see the inclusion of support for cloud-connectivity to providers like AWS.

We have been using Hitachi NAS for about ten years.

The stability is great.

Hitachi NAS is for enterprise-level organizations but the standard varies across the world. It is easy to scale but in Sri Lanka, you will have 10,000 or 20,000 users, maximum.

Hitachi's technical support is good.

I have used solutions by Dell EMC and they are easier to use. EMC also has cloud-connectivity built-in.

I would say that the initial setup is of medium complexity. It is not as easy as these "on the fly" solutions but it is not that much harder, either.

The length of time required for deployment depends on the customer, their requirements, and their environment. It may take a couple of days to complete.

We have an in-house team that does the implementation and deployment for our customers.

Maintenance is not done by us or the customer, but rather the partner. It involves installing updates and things like that.

This solution is not suitable for SMB because the price is more expensive. Costs are based on the features and it is a considerable amount. It really depends on the needs of the client.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to get support for the process. It's not a customer-implementable solution if you don't have a Hitachi-certified engineer.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I am working for a reseller and this is one of the solutions that I have experience in dealing with. This is a NAS gateway solution that provides access to storage that is externally attached.

The pricing of this solution is good, which is an advantage that positions this product well.

I do not like Hitachi NAS because it's an old-school NAS solution, compared to the other, newer-type solutions such as Isilon from Dell or Qumulo. It is an old-school gateway NAS solution, so for me, it is not good.

I have been familiar with Hitachi NAS for about two years.

I have experience with several NAS solutions including those by HP, Dell, NetApp, and Hitachi.

This solution is priced well and there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

It is not possible to improve upon this solution. Rather, they should just create a new product to completely replace this one.

Overall, this is a good product for what it is, but it is old-school. I would completely renew the product. It works nicely, but I would not recommend it for the same reason that people don't buy old-fashioned clothes.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

• Performance
• Replication
• You can use any type of storage as a backend
• Mixed NFS/CIFS file services

• Higher performance
• File-server consolidation
• Ability to create a mixed NFS/CIFS (Samba style) file services solution

• Better QA
• Reporting
• Better quota management
• Ability to backup with all snapshots included.
• Ability to snapshot a file system in the DR site while replicating with JetMirror
• Better documentation
• Better community

I've used it for two to three years.

It had some ridiculous bugs during deployment.

We have had two stability issues:

• We had a bad software version that used to randomly crash both nodes in a cluster
• File system corruption after activating in DR site

No issues yet.

It's at a fair level but has bad documentation.

It's fair.

I previously used Netapp's solution, but this was for a different customer.

It’s relatively easy to setup and install.

We used a mix of a vendor team along with an in-house team. The vendor team was good.

We got the equipment via a large storage accusation for almost free so no ROI was needed.

No, not for this particular customer.

Some bugs cause issues but I love the ASIC architecture behind it. I actually uncovered some hidden ASICs in the hardware. Version 8 features didn’t include in-line de-duplication (it uses an ASIC) which was later uncovered in version 10 or so. It’s nice to find out about added functionality with version upgrades at no extra cost with as little to no performance degradation using this ASIC.