HDS fills in the available blank space in VSP range

HDS has released the last new mid-range member of its VSP data centre disk array range, the G800, with its configuration perhaps indicating a high-end refresh is coming.

The G800 was announced in April with its availability revealed in a Mike Nalls blog with no formal announcement.

Nalls is an HDS senior product manager. Specs can be found on an HDS product web page, where it is placed at the top end of the mid-range VSP systems.

This range sits above the Unified Storage (US) family of arrays.

HDS’ VSP range now looks like this:

• G200 with 1.5PB maximum raw capacity
• G400 with 2.88PB
• G600 with 4.32PB
• G800 with 8.64PB
• G1000 with 6.91PB

The G800 has a higher capacity than the G1000, the top-end VSP product. That is because the G800 can have 1,440 large-form-factor drives (3.5-inch) vs the G1000’s 1,152 drives. More significantly, the G800 can have 1,440 SSDS vs the G1000’s 384.

Both arrays can have the same number of flash modules, at 576, giving 2PB capacity in that dimension.

HDS VSP range

This G800 has a maximum SSD capacity of 461TB vs the G1000’s 302TB, even though the G800’s maximum SSD size is 400GB while the G1000 gets to use 800GB ones as well as the 400GB product.

There are differences in expansion trays too; the G1000 uses 16U trays (96 x 3.5-inch drives or 192 x 2.5-inch) and can have 12 of them, which contrasts markedly with the G800’s 48 x 2U trays (12 x 3.5-inch/24 x 2.5-inch drives) or 24 x 4U trays (60 drives).

The G800 can have 48 x 2U (12 FMDS) Flash module expansion trays, meaning 576 FMDS, while the G1000 gets 16 x 4u (48 FMDS) meaning 768 of them.

The G1000’s big edge is that it has up to 16 controllers, while the poor little G800 only gets two. Still, with the differences mentioned above, we wouldn’t be too surprised if a G1000 refresh came along.

Nalls mentions two new capabilities – a “global-active device feature enables active-active data centres with zero downtime, zero recovery time objectives and no data loss.”

Its available “cross the entire VSP family” as is “Hitachi Dynamic Tiering active flash, which improves workload responsiveness by rapidly moving suddenly active data to flash tiers for maximum performance.” ®