Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Reviews

We primarily use the solution for data storage and processing.

The solution is very user-friendly in terms of maintenance and configuration. It's also possible to connect the solution to other storage management solutions.

The solution needs to offer more support in our region. It's also quite expensive.

Since we can't get support, it would be helpful if there was more documentation online to help users navigate the solution when they run into issues or have questions.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues with it.

We don't have access to technical support in our region.

Previously we used IBM systems. We switched to Hitachi about 20 years ago.

The initial setup was difficult, as we don't have access to assistance. We had some issues around configuration. We needed to know things like what kind of raid is the best, or what kind of replication is ideal. We had to seek out answers online to get the information we needed.  

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use this solution primarily within our large IaaS platform for All-Purpose Storage, Tiered Storage, Storage Replication, and non-disruptive Data Mobility between storage tiers. It is an ideal device for secure multi-tenanting and those hosting many clients.  

This solution has given us a huge improvement to DR, resiliency, and business continuity.

The hybrid array provides scaleable, predictable, high performance with no capacity constraints.

The G-Series platform has proven to be our platform of choice for providing our clients with reliable IaaS and cloud services.   

The most valuable features of this solution are its Data Mobility and High-performance flash capabilities.

The Management Interface needs to be improved. Hitachi Vantara has invested heavily in improving their management interface, however, they still have a way to go to catch up with many of their competitors.

The G-Series is an extremely stable platform, a chief criterion for deploying it in our IaaS and cloud services platforms. 

Scalability is one of the best in the industry. The G-Series is soon to be superseded by Hitachi's next generation of enterprise storage, which I'm confident will continue the Hitachi tradition of extreme scalability with virtually unbreakable reliability.

Because our own engineers have a high skill base and accreditation on the G-Series, it is seldom that we have to seek vendor support or request a call out. Whenever we do, we experience professional and skilled levels of support. 

We have used Hitachi high-end storage products for many of the past fifteen years as the primary storage resource for our enterprise clients. About ten years ago, we were struggling with Hitachi's local sales force not being proactive/value-added enough, so we made the decision to introduce another storage vendor (NetApp) into our infrastructure. The two vendors continue to coexist and compete today in a positive way.  

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. The G-Series was an evolution of our previous enterprise storage platform, and its deployment was largely problem-free, non-disruptive, and transparent to our clients.  

The vendor team assisted our in-house team with the deployment. They were highly experienced and skilled personnel. 

Our main issue with the Hitachi G-Series is what we consider to be an archaic software licensing scheme and high maintenance costs. It makes little sense in this era to continue to use capacity-sensitive licensing and costs that might have been acceptable in the 1990s but not now.

Ten years ago we evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, EMC, and IBM high-end storage. Hitachi and NetApp won. 

This machine was being used in the DMZ area of the company. It was isolated. The external users were something around 4.5 million customers. I don't know if every one of them uses the machine, but this machine is the gateway to the website and host application. 

To install and do maintenance on this machine at this scale was a one person job. It was a storage admin for this use case. If I look only at that solution, it's not a full-time job. 

We increased the capacity of the solution one year after we initially bought it. Before I left my last job, one of the decisions I made was to change the solution to another platform in this environment. It was also out of warranty. They're still using this appliance, but they need to migrate out of it to another solution. 

It may be a newer version of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series or a new solution from another vendor. It depends on the product features and total cost. 

It's the public sector, so everything is running on a bid process. The suppliers bid to give a better offer to win the opportunity. Hitachi came up with a better deal and pricing.

The company is opening up opportunities for vendors. The vendors that supply the solution at the lowest prices win the bidding. It's a public sector or government contract. There was special pricing in this case since it's the government sector.

Four years in that environment, the Hitachi GAD we used to replicate in between the primary site and the secondary site was finished. After we started using GAD, we didn't have to replicate the data anymore. It was already up to date in both types.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series eliminated all the management around replication. It helps us to do the recovery better and easier. We removed the software that was managing all the little steps in synchronizing the recovery plan.

I found the Hitachi GAD, Global Active Device feature, most valuable because it enables direct access to the same volume from different physical sites.

With Hitachi, everything that regards the user experience has a big room for improvement. 

• The user experience is pretty bad in Hitachi. 
• A lot of mandatory tasks take a long time to work through.
• Compared to other storage vendors, there is a big disadvantage to Hitachi. 
• Automation has room for improvement in Hitachi.

Something about the NetSure schedule and NetSure management would be good because in my machine everything was only manual. My staff was needed to write automation around the machine to solve the issue. 

Before the snapshot itself, residing on another server was more extensive. If they can do the snapshot in the data pool, i.e. the capacity pool, it will be better for the customer and their matchup vs. the competition.

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series is a very steady solution. It's a state of the art solution in storage systems. 

High-availability and performance are the strongest aspects of these machines.

When you purchase the machine, you need to know what the purpose is that you buy the machine for. If you do design, it's pretty scalable for most use cases. 

As a career job, I have around 45 storage machines. If I didn't have enough room in one, I choose another for use.

I used to work with their tech support. Every time I had the need for support, I got it directly from the Israeli team. I didn't have a chance to work with the global support team. 

The local team is great. It was very responsive and very generous.

The previous solution was a sync-based solution storage system. It wasn't active/active and before that, we used EMC VPLEX in another environment. We tested the active/active feature benefits. 

One of the main demands for this particular solution was to be active/active. At that time, the only vendors that offered an active/active machine were EMC and Hitachi.

The initial setup is not straightforward. You need to be a storage expert to install the product and work with it. It's not that simple and discouraging.

If it wasn't so complicated to install it, it would be better. Every step takes a lot of time in the system. But it's a very steady system. It works after the initial setup.

Deployment took two months before we started to migrate data. There was another month for the data migration and two months was the machine hardware install, the software updates, and resilience checks from my side. 

After all the setup and the discovery of the product, we started to schedule dates for data migration and move all the relevant data subscriptions.

I was the customer. The vendor supported the installation for three months, i.e. the initial setup and checks for another month to assist the data migration.

Return-on-investment comes from satisfaction in the product. It was 90% of what I expected it to be and that is very good.

We don't have a monthly license for this product. We just got it up front. We are in the governmental sector, so it was very cheap for us.

This version on the market is priced at a much higher cost. Since we are in government, we got a discount. We grew and the purchase needed additions since the time of installation.

It was just the EMC Unity with VPLEX, i.e. two Unity VPLEX machines: the VSP 400. We required two machines to support the VSP 400. It was all about money. The bottom line. 

You first need to qualify the technical requirements. Both of them qualified, so it was money related. The bottom line was whether another solution was better, so long as they met all the requirements and they were the cheapest.

If the solution is not compliant with our demands, we can't offer it to the company. Because of that, only two vendors got the chance to offer the solution. It was down to VSP and DELL/EMC Unity didn't meet the requirements.

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series are real sturdy machines with high-performance capabilities. I didn't do a POC before choosing the solution, but I did go to visit several customers who already had similar solutions from the company. 

I talked to them and got an impression. If you have time for POC it will be better. In the government, it is not very often that we do a POC. They're very thin and human resources didn't have time.

On a scale from one to 10, I would rate the product an eight for the management. The lack of management features on the product is very deflating.

It's very difficult to find this class of machine from other vendors. The storage system is high-availability. The performance is elite.

For the system and performance, this machine is very impressive. It's working 24 hours a day. The machine is very reliable for the user experience.

This gave a big boost to the performance of the application because of the Flash. It also introduced compression which makes the storage more efficient.

The first thing that attracted this model to us was the non-disruptive migration. We had a very large database application that was on older gear and needed to be migrated to these arrays. We had experience with virtualizing behind an array and moving applications and data but this made it even better.

The software has always been lagging a bit compared to the newer features. It usually takes a cycle for it to catch up.

This product is very stable and we didn’t experience any issues.

It scales to a very large array and we haven’t encroached on its limits yet. This particular database application is growing rapidly and we have had to expand several times in the last year.

Excellent. The team is very knowledgeable about their products and how these work with other products.

The previous solution was Hitachi but it had spinning disks. We went to all Flash for the performance.

The initial setup of the non-disruptive migration was complex but we had excellent assistance from Hitachi.

The pricing we get is very competitive when compared to other vendors. Hitachi is working on their licensing model and it is improving but can be irksome when many different items are not bundled or enterprise size.

We evaluated three different solutions, products from EMC, IBM and Hitachi. The vendors provided several configurations including all Flash and hybrid configurations.

Definitely check it out. Talk to other customers and look into the stability and reliability of Hitachi products. They are conservative and don’t market heavily but they are determined to be right and data is the most important aspect.

We use the platform for virtualization purposes.

The product provides a good storage space.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform's GUI could be better.

We have been using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform for ten years. At present, we use the latest version.

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. We encountered a few stability problems.

I rate the product's scalability a five out of ten.

The distributor needs more knowledgeable resources for technical support. It would be better to connect directly to the vendor in case of queries.

Negative

We have used BMC and Hewlett-Packard before.

The initial setup is difficult. I rate the process a five out of ten. It takes a few hours to a day to complete.

It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a three out of ten.

I recommend Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform to others and rate it a seven out of ten.