Tier-1 Performance Workloads Can Enjoy the

Benefits of Object Storage With Hitachi’s HCP

2   Li ke

Obje
ct storage began as an economical way to archive large amounts of unstructured data. Today vast
amounts of data have been archived on object storage where they also gain the benefits of
scalability, protection, compliance, and cost efficiency. Up to now, enterprises have been reluctant
to use object storage for tier-1 application due to the meta data management overhead associated
with object storage. Now Hitachi Vantara makes it possible for organizations to realize these same
benefits, and more, with their Tier-1 workloads such as AI/ML, analytics, data warehouses and S3
cloud applications while maintaining the performance levels that they require. Tier-1 workloads are
also seeing an increase in threats such as ransomware and increasing compliance requirements like
GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) which can be
addressed more easily with the immutability and data protection of object storage systems like HCP.

While object storage is associated with petabyte-scale data volumes and economical long-term data
retention, its meta data structure was thought to impact performance in comparison to file and
block storage systems in the tier 1 enterprise mainstream. Recent enhancements to technology such
as the use of Flash and NVMe, multi-core processors, and virtualization have closed that
performance gap. Software virtualization of the OS (VM instances), application (containers) and
storage resources (software-defined storage) interpose an abstraction layer between hardware
implementations and applications. By decoupling the storage data and control planes, virtualization
enables distributed, scale-out clusters of any size and capacity to increase overall performance.

Hitachi Vantara’s object storage solution also has a unique approach to enhancing the search
capability of tier-1 workloads. Hitachi Content Intelligence automates the extraction, classification,
enrichment, and categorization of data residing on both Hitachi Vantara and third-party repositories,
located on-premises and in clouds, and across heterogeneous data repositories (internal and
external). This approach drastically reduces time spent searching for what is needed or recreating
what already exists. Additionally, Content Intelligence delivers:
 

 Guided data exploration based on automated classification and categorization.

 Immediate visibility to all your data by unifying data access across disparate locations and
data types.
 Important insights by transforming your data into valuable business information.
 Managed access to sensitive data with granular access controls and security system
integrations.
 The right data to the right person at the right time, using personalized and self- service
features and user experiences.

Last year (October 2020) ESG published a Technical Review and Lab Validation of Hitachi Content
Platform: High-performance Object Storage for Tier-1 Workloads. In this technical lab validation, ESG
reviews performance tests and results that were based on real-world customer configurations and
concludes HCP object storage delivers the high performance and scalability that enterprises demand
of their business-driven workloads. These performance results change the role of object storage.
Now, the object storage advantages of massive scalability, fast data retrieval, and cost efficiency can
be used with tier-1 production workloads. The results Showed:
 

 Average large object GET and PUT performance of 14GB/sec to 40GB/sec throughput
 Average small object GET and PUT performance of 44K to 141K operations/second.
 Time-to-first-byte performance of 15 ms or less

ESG also reviewed several customer examples that demonstrate the real-world performance
benefits of HCP object storage.
 

 1TB/minute with Exabyte Scale. A government customer used 54 HCP nodes to deliver
1TB/minute throughput for a 22 PB Hadoop data lake using the S3A protocol. This
customer was collecting huge amounts of streaming data including voice, data logs,
machine logs, and security event logs for analysis. The HCP solution delivered faster, more
accurate data insights across multiple data sources with cost efficiency. The customer
expects to grow to more than 80 PB within two years, with all data retained for a year.

 1 trillion objects, 12 GB/second. Using an HCP all-flash configuration, a customer in the

financial services industry with heavy growth ingested one trillion objects over 12
petabytes of storage, across 56different applications, and maintained12GB/sec small object
(e.g., emails, PDFs, metadata) performance while ensuring full regulatory compliance.
Metadata, indexing, and search functions supported all business use cases interfacing with
the data, including legal hold, compliance, dispositioning, and high-performance search.
Performance was critical since this archive is part of the company’s primary customer
interaction workflow. The customer extracted the data and metadata, offloaded, and
retired a mainframe environment, gained massive growth with performance at scale, and
 deployed new use cases. Furthermore, by consolidating multiple data sources onto HCP,
they were able to save $100M in administrative and maintenance costs over five years.

 15ms response rate. Another government customer needed to host client data review
processes and wanted to provide sustained performance of 50 ms or less for time to first
byte, so that employees could work productively. The HCP all-flash solution overachieved
this objective and delivered a sub-15ms time to first byte to support the customer’s one PB
of data, enabling higher productivity and delivering the needed customer experience.

 High-performance consolidation. Another financial services organization wanted to

consolidate regulated unstructured data from content management and data repositories,
taking data from highspeed Fibre Channel storage and NAS platforms. Using multiple all-
flash HCP clusters, this company consolidated multiple service tiers into a single, high-
performance tier.

Organizations need more data, faster, to deliver insights that drive business decisions. They also
need greater protection against threats like ransomware, greater transparency for compliance, and
greater visibility into all their data which can only come about through the rich meta data
capabilities of an object storage system like Hitachi’s HCP. According to ESG research, 53% of
respondent organizations expect to accelerate spending for on-premises object storage. 32% of
those organizations that are accelerating their investments in on-premises storage identified AI/ML
as workloads that will be responsible for storage spending growth, while 38% of those organizations
identified IoT and 29% identified data warehouses as drivers of spending growth.