Storage Is Critical for Maximizing Data Protection, Capacity and Performance

Deploying a virtualization environment that delivers the data protection, efficiency and performance you require while returning maximum value is no simple task. You must overcome challenges of data lifecycle management, virtualization workloads and capacity inefficiencies. You must also address service level objectives related to provisioning, backing up and restoring. Meeting these challenges calls for a storage solution uniquely designed and optimized for VMware workloads and environments.

Realize the Lowest NAS Storage Total Cost of Ownership Within VMware Environments

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Enterprises are reaping the enormous benefits of virtu-alization, from consolidation and lowered IT expenses to a more agile organization. IT decision-makers are increasingly choosing VMware to extend the value of their existing data center investments. However, of the 3 primary data center components — servers, network and storage — data storage is often the most overlooked path to virtualization success. Fulfilling the high demands of applications running on virtual-ized servers requires the addition of network storage resources designed for the task.1

In fact, achieving the most predictable, reliable and repeatable VMware performance and fastest time to value takes more than just adding more storage resources. Achieving data protection, capacity, perfor-mance and scalability demands a balanced storage solution. It must address the data management challenges of virtual machine (VM) sprawl, improve utilization, deliver I/O performance, and scale as busi-ness needs change.

1 IDC, “Worldwide Storage and Virtualized x86 Environments 2012 – 2016 Forecast,” July 2012.

SOLUTION PROFILE

Hitachi network attached storage (NAS) solutions address the challenges of VMware virtual server and virtual desktop infrastruc-ture (VDI) environments by delivering:

■■ Data protection: Reduce risk and empower VM administrators to apply data management best practices and improve availability with fast backups, granular restores and cost-effective disaster recovery.■■ Storage efficiency: Intelligently manage VM growth and achieve high VM densi-ties, improve storage utilization by tiering and archiving stale user data, which reduces capacity needs and capital expenditure (capex).■■ Virtualization performance: Streamline VM lifecycle management by anticipating I/O performance and offloading tasks, such as virus scanning, cloning and boot storms, reducing overhead on the back-end storage system.■■ Scalability: Stay ahead of VM sprawl with an object-based file system and scalable virtual file servers.

Hitachi leverages decades of expertise in cre-ating high-performance storage solutions. We deliver a storage platform optimized to meet the needs of VMware environments running a wide spectrum of virtualized applications, including VDI. Hitachi storage solutions are the engine that accelerates your path to realizing the value from your VMware investment. You gain a centralized storage resource that sim-plifies data protection and VM creation while meeting critical storage efficiency and perfor-mance objectives.

The HNAS architecture offers a converged, high-performance, scalable network stor-age system that helps solve the most challenging data protection, efficiency and performance concerns. HNAS provides fast snapshot, replication and cloning utilities. These utilities save IT administrators time, allowing them to grow their VMware deploy-ment and extend data protection best practices while freeing up storage capac-ity and reducing costs. To free up critical I/O, storage systems within HNAS offload common virtualization workloads, reducing overhead on the back-end storage system.

Enhance Data Protection

Efficient, scalable, consistent and managed virtual machine backup removes single points of failure.

■■ Logically and reliably protect thousands of VMs from a single point of management.■■ Node clustering, automatic failover and snapshot copies replicate data for fast disaster recovery.■■ New VMs are automatically protected, easing the burden on storage administration.

Improve Capacity Efficiency and Value

Gain a single point of administration for stor-age connected to VMware ESX clusters.

■■ Provision hundreds of VM clones with less space in less time and effort.■■ Intelligently manage data tiering while improving storage utilization and consolidation.■■ Fast, efficient clone creation and provi-sioning reduces IT and storage hardware expenses.

Accelerate Performance and Scalability

Innovative, flexible storage technology ensures VMware applications deliver top performance.

■■ Efficiently manage the VM lifecycle and intelligently anticipate fluctuating I/O workloads.■■ Object-based file system and virtual file servers perform faster and scale up to 32PB per cluster.■■ Avoid performance and retention issues associated with VMware hypervisor-based VM snapshots.■■ Reduce virtualization complexity while reducing the need for more IT staff.

Virtualized Environments Demand Unique Storage Capabilities Virtualized infrastructures are simply not the same as their nonvirtualized counter-parts. Virtualization eliminates data silos and improves resource utilization by man-aging pooled discrete resources. However, virtualization workloads can tax system requirements because I/O varies greatly between peak workload (boot, log-in and virus scan storms) and steady-state work-load. This also forces the need for almost instantaneous, granular recovery of VMs, fast snapshots, deduplication and improved recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO and RTO).

As VM environments grow, storage admin-istrators must clone VMs and create and restore snapshots more frequently, generat-ing efficiency and data management issues. IT also must have fast replication in place to move secondary copies to off-site recovery locations. Administrators need to address storage capacity and density through nondis-ruptive tiering to free up inactive or stale user data, while properly sizing storage resources. Improperly sized storage results in greater hardware requirements and expenses. What’s more, these issues become more difficult to overcome as the virtualized envi-ronment grows, placing further burdens on the VM data management lifecycle.

Realizing the most value from a virtualized VMware infrastructure calls for an integrated, high-performance solution, one that is opti-mized from the storage architecture to the data management center.

Hitachi Data Systems Delivers the Optimal Storage Solution for VMwareYou need a way to realize the most value from your virtualization investment. Hitachi presents Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS), a high-performance architecture that com-bines advanced data management with an integrated storage ecosystem. HNAS platforms operate in combination with the comprehensive Hitachi technology frame-work. These integrated components deliver an optimized storage solution that efficiently addresses the unique storage requirements of VMware environments.

Hitachi NAS Platforms and Hitachi NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator allow you to quickly deploy a VMware-optimized storage solution that delivers the highest data protection, efficiency and value.

Why HNAS for VMware Environments?A VMware environment’s unique workload and lifecycle management tasks call for a storage solution designed for efficiency, scalability and data protection. The HNAS architecture is uniquely tailored for virtualization deploy-ments that require high-performance, scalable storage to drive revenue, improve efficiency and speed time-to-market. Tight integration between VMware vCenter, Hitachi NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator and BlueArc JetMirror gives administrators access to storage-based services like VM backup, recovery and rep-lication. This access frees up ESX server resources to focus on application workloads.

Deep Data Protection

With thousands of virtual desktops running simultaneously, the risk of losing critical data is a constant concern. BlueArc JetMirror cre-ates object-based, space-efficient snapshots of VM sessions usable as recovery points for fast restoration.

■■ Improve replication performance by 2 to 3 times, while boosting incremental repli-cation up to 25 times.■■ Object replication enables fast failover in the event of a disaster, eliminating dupli-cate hardware at multiple locations.■■ Boost responsiveness through real-time discovery and reporting on storage health and data usage.■■ Seamless integration with Hitachi NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator and VMware vCenter provides quick and effi-cient data management for virtual server and VDI environments.

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TAbLE 1. HITACHI NAS PLATfORM: OPTIMIzED fOR VMWARE ENVIRONMENTS

Business Challenge Hitachi NAS Platform Feature

Benefits

Data management is too complex

Hitachi NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator (VII) provides unlimited virtual machine (VM) snapshots

Automatically clone and backup VMs for deep data protection

Difficult and slow to create snapshots and replicate VMs

VII pointer-based or storage- based snapshots and BlueArc JetMirror replication

Enable VM, VMDK or individual file restore from vCenter interface and fast replication

Ineffective management of data growth

VII primary deduplication and Hitachi Data Tiering (HDT)

Improve system per-formance and storage efficiency at a lower costHigh storage capital

expenditure

Poor storage monitoring capabilities

VII cloning and VAAI Expose accurate stor-age utilization and reduce VM sprawl

Can’t meet SLAs because of unpredict-able I/O performance

Hybrid core architecture Achieve consistent I/O performance

VM lifecycle manage-ment is too complicated

VII and BlueArc JetClone Simplify and automate the VM data manage-ment lifecycle

Must future-proof stor-age through scalability

32PB per cluster, native block plus native file

Scale the VMware environment without sacrificing performance

■■ Manage storage-based snapshots directly from vCenter for flexible scheduling and automated backups (see Figure 1).

Improve Capacity and Efficiency

Using the right disk for the right data while creating efficient snapshots is often a manual task. NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator and HNAS deduplication create efficient snapshots and replicas for improved storage efficiency.

■■ Mix high-performance disks with lower cost disks while still achieving the same high performance.

■■ Reduce the number of spindles by 30% while improving performance by 10%.■■ Archive VMs so they can be safely deleted. ■■ Improve storage utilization with VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), reducing storage allocation by 95%.■■ Consolidate and improve utilization of 3rd-party storage.■■ Add storage capacity when necessary, distributing data dynamically across avail-able storage to optimize capacity and efficiency.

figure 1. Manage Directly from vCenter.

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High Performance

HNAS and NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator optimize VMware workloads and lifecycle management, delivering the optimal platform for high-performance, high-I/O and data-intensive environments.

■■ Offloads I/O-intensive operations and quickly clone space-efficient VMs with 95% less space in 99.9% less time.■■ Clone or back up a 1TB VM in 9 seconds.■■ Support vSphere and file-serving work-loads concurrently.■■ Internal operations are 25% faster; hybrid core means performance stays consistent as opposed to CPU-based design that causes I/O performance to deteriorate.■■ HNAS hybrid core architecture excels at addressing heavy random-I/O profiles.■■ NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator used with VMware vCenter frees up ESX server resources to focus on serving application workloads.

Extreme Scalability and Integration

HNAS scales up to a multinode cluster with I/O balancing occurring automatically, simplifying administration while delivering a high-performance VMware environment that evolves as your needs change.

■■ Scale to 8 nodes in a single storage cluster to meet expanding demands with enhanced access, capacity and performance.■■ Add storage to meet new application or business needs, or to consolidate disparate storage into a single point of management, without requiring additional overhead or downtime.■■ Provision multiple file systems for a massive capacity of up to 16PB under a single namespace, 32PB for a single cluster.■■ Gain a single point of NFS management with the integrated vSphere/vCenter plug-in.■■ Support for VMware vStorage API for Storage Awareness (VASA), which enables visibility from vCenter into the storage system, physical storage resources, and information based on topology, capability and component state.

Addresses Network Storage Requirements

Hitachi NAS Platform systems provide a flexible, powerful set of solutions for your VMware vSphere needs. All HNAS platforms deploy the industry-leading file system, Hitachi NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator cloning, and BlueArc JetMirror object-based replication to deliver a complete storage eco-system. These solutions support a full range of IT requirements, price points, applications and user loads.

SummaryHitachi NAS Platform provides all the storage features required to support a wide range of VMware applications and deployments. Its ability to simplify data protection and its storage efficiencies, high performance and massive scalability make HNAS an optimal solution for your VMware deployment. Gain peace of mind that you can deploy and sup-port thousands of virtual machines from one centrally managed storage system while real-izing the most value from your investment.

By addressing the most demanding vir-tualization, data protection and storage challenges, Hitachi Data Systems high- performance storage solutions meet the challenge of extensive data growth, VM sprawl and highly transactional, I/O-intensive operations. Choosing the right storage system is the most critical design decision to help guarantee a VMware deployment’s success, while lowering both capex and operating expenditures (opex).

■■ Deep data protection.

■■ High capacity.

■■ Efficient utilization.

■■ High performance and scalability.

■■ Optimized for VMware.

Hitachi NAS Platform with Hitachi NAS Virtual Infrastructure Integrator simplifies the VM lifecycle.