HITACHI STORAGE

Hitachi VSP Architecture

August 4, 2016 Hitachi Storage

Overview
The VSP is enterprise storage array that scales from a single bay up
to a maximum of 6 bays. The two central bays house what Hitachi is
calling Control Chassis (containing processors, memory, front and
backend connectivity) as well as drive enclosures. The remaining 4
bays can contain only drive enclosures (Max 2048 Drives).

1.

It comes in a standard sized 42u 19 inch rack

2.

Has a hot and cold isle airflow design

3.

Can take power feeds from above or below you can now install
one in your garage without installing a raised floor.

Sub-LUN Tiering
Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT).
1.

All drives can be placed into a single tiering pool. SSD, SAS and
SATA into a Single tier Pool.

2.

New data is staged to the highest tieravailable, and then, as it

becomes less active it is migrated down the tiers.

3.

The Sub-LUN extent size42 MB- VSP will move data up and
down the tiers in units of 42MB (contiguous space).

4.

On the policy side of things, you can set gathering windows,

exclusion windows, and the movement cycle is between 1-24 hours.
SAS backend and 2.5 inch drives

SAS and 2.5 inch drives are supported in VSP

Front End Director (FED) Design

Data Accelerator ASICs
The FEDs and BEDs have custom I/O routing ASICs that are
specialised for I/O traffic management. These ASICs have an affinity
with ports and CPUs are no longer locked to a particular ports all
ports are moved to a processor complex called the Virtual Storage
Director (VSD) where ports are pooled and can have their resources
dynamically assigned and un-assigned from any front or back end
port.
Control Chassis (Logic Boxes)
Control Chassis are two(Control Chassis 0 and Control Chassis 1)
The picture below is of the front and rear of a frame containing a
Control Chassis. The Control Chassis is in the bottom half on both
pictures; the top half contains the drive enclosures hidden by fans.

At the front there are 4 x Virtual Storage Directors (VSD), and 8 x Data
Cache Directors and at the rear there are 8 x FEDs, 4 x BEDs, and 8 x
Grid Switches, or GSW.

Data cache is backed up to onboard flash drives,Each BED has 8 x

6Gbps SAS paths. That adds up to 32 backend SAS links per Control
Chassis, and 64 x 6Gbps links in a fully configured unit. SAS runs at
full duplex.

Control Memory (CM) is located on the Virtual Storage Directors

alongside the general purpose CPUs making it very quickly accessible
to the CPUs, like an L2 cache. As with previous architectures, Control
Memory stores the usual metadata and system state such as LDEV
mappings, DIF tables, run tables etc.
Grid Switches The Grid Switch boards provide the, 4-lane PCIe
gen. 1, paths that cross connect all of the other boards. Each Control
Chassis can have either two or four GSW boards. Each GSW board has
24 unidirectional ports, each port having a send and receive path, with
each operating at 1024MB/s.Hitachi refers to the Control Chassis as
being tightly coupled, and the interconnect between the two is PCIe
gen 1 over copper. The Control Chassi are able to communicate by
mapping Hi-Star over PCIe.