Roughly a month ago, Hitachi announced a new line of mid-range storage, i.e. the G200, G400, and G600 (there will be a G800 at some point in the future as well). These storage systems are derived from Hitachi’s G1000, which is the company’s flagship system. These new systems, which I’ll refer to for the remainder of this post as the Gx00 arrays, will replace the Hitachi’s HUS100 family of arrays. The new systems provide a noteworthy bump up in performance capability over their predecessors, a very nice set of software features/functionalities, and an operating system (OS) that is common across the Gx00 arrays and the G1000. It is on that last feature — the common OS — that this post will focus on.
Having an OS, microcode, and software capabilities that are common from the enterprise storage system down through the modular line of storage systems is a novel (for storage vendors that offer monolithic and modular storage systems) and beneficial idea. How? From an administrative perspective, the common OS will make administering the Hitachi storage systems more straightforward. Once a storage administrator knows the software on one system, that admin will be able to find his way around on any of the Gx00 or G1000 systems, and administrators will like this. In the words of one of my storage admin friends after he had heard of the common OS across the Gx00 line of storage, “This is a game changer! It’s awesome!”
For companies that have both modular and enterprise Hitachi storage systems (which is the case with many, if not most, enterprise customers), this means that those companies’ storage administrators will spend less time learning, getting trained on, and fumbling around on different software interfaces, and more time doing productive work. Of course, more productive time on the job ultimately means more profit for the company.
There will be more to come on the Gx00 Hitachi systems.