This article is more than 1 year old

HDS turns its back to ASICs: Storage vaults to rely on x86 sans magic

Tickling IT buyers' sensitivities by hitting the G-spot

With its greatly expanded VSP G-line of products, Hitachi Data Systems has opened a path to a single converged enterprise storage array platform – and has done so by eliminating proprietary hardware dependencies.

The high-end VSP G1000 has a handful of ASICs for hardware acceleration and a PCIe backplane with similar custom chips. The newly-announced G800, G600, 400 and 200 systems have no ASICs at all, relying just on x86 hardware, and still using PCIe.

(ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits – bespoke chips designed for very particular workloads, as opposed to general-purpose processors like Intel and AMD's x86 chips that can be thrown at any old code. Generic CPUs versus highly specialized ASICs are discussed here and here.)

Our understanding is that HDS will refresh the G1000 in an ASIC-free form eventually.

In a further line expansion, the VSP operating system, SVOS, will be released as a software-only product, running inside a virtual machine. It has been demoed in HDS Connect in Las Vegas, running on laptop hardware and hooked up to VSP arrays in remote data centers.

We've learned there will also be a unified component made available for G-line systems to provide a NAS function. It will have an FPGA for hardware acceleration, and it will feature HNAS running inside a VM – a very light, container-like VM under HDS's own hypervisor. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like