The Hitachi HNAS system, now known as VSP One File, is a scale-out NAS system with custom hardware designs for high performance NFS and CIFS/SMB access. VSP One File is a dedicated file-serving appliances with the ability to scale up to 16PB in a single namespace with a single file system of up to 256 TB. The system uses custom architecture, which implements dedicated file server functions in hardware using parallel state machines to provide the same functionality as the software functions running on a standard server of competitive offerings.
Hitachi has created a high-performance NAS system by implementing much of the traditional file serving functionality in hardware. It does this by implementing the TCP/IP software stack, file system, file system protocols and storage functions in hardware using field programmable gate array chips (FPGAs). Using internal switching logic, VSP One File includes a switched back-end architecture for the storage. The hardware-intensive implementation allows the device to process remote file requests faster than implementations that use standard server platforms with software implementations. The implementation is based on custom logic implemented with FPGAs for specific tasks that are usually performed by a processor running software.
The VSP One File system supports deduplication through hardware FPGAs to minimize impact of the data reduction. Migration with a policy engine is supported for file to NAS systems using NFS and to object or cloud systems using Amazon S3 protocol.
Hitachi VSP One File (HNAS) Product Review Includes:
- Overview
- Highlights
- Usage
- Architecture Deployment
- Futurum EvaluScale Product Review Methodology
- Futurum Group’s Opinion
Download now to read the full product review!
