Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has been quietly transforming itself over the past few years, building its intellectual property and prowess in emerging technology markets like cloud, virtualization and data analytics. Now HDS is looking to make an quantum leap forward which bolsters its software-defined infrastructure portfolio.
These new and enhanced offerings have been designed to help customers achieve greater levels of information access through virtualized, hyper-converged and scale-out platforms that are built to accelerate the journey to IT as a service (ITaaS) through application-led, software-defined architectures.
The company launched these products in April at Las Vegas, and that was followed by APAC region. In India, HDS, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japanese electronics giant Hitachi, will be showcasing these new SDN offerings in eight cities for its partners and customers.
As per new offerings, HDS has extended its Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) to an expanded Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family, expanding the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family to cover core to edge or small to large converged and hyper-converged infrastructure models. The Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform (HSP) is meant for fast-growing data analytics workloads, bringing to market new software to automate the provisioning and protection of application environments.
“The fundamentals of IT are changing. Whether it is the adoption of ‘third platform’ technologies and striking the proper balance among the different modes of IT, or the ongoing move to providing IT as a service, there is real change taking place, all while our customers are trying to move to ITaaS,” said Vivekanand Venugopal, VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems, India.
“Customers are looking for ways to be more agile and flexible to gain a competitive advantage. Hitachi is delivering a new generation of software-defined technologies built to support the changing needs of customer application environments to deliver on those goals and connect what works today with what’s next.”
Storage Virtualization to the Masses
With the newest additions to the Hitachi VSP family – the G200, G400, G600 and the upcoming G800 – Hitachi Data Systems is the only IT vendor to address customer workload requirement from entry to the mainframe with a single software stack.
Extending the reach of powerful software capabilities that are built into Hitachi SVOS allows the entire VSP family to offer native heterogeneous storage virtualization and multi-site active-active storage – as well as fully compatible data migration, replication and management. Customers now have the ability to choose systems based on the necessary capacity, performance and price required to meet their business goals, not because of functional difference.
Customers looking at smaller systems will now get access to the same virtualization technology that has existed in prior HDS high-end systems.
Best of Breed Converged Platforms for Any Workload
The latest additions to the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family include the hyper-converged Hitachi UCP 1000 for VMware EVO:RAIL, and the converged Hitachi UCP 2000, both use new rack servers and target small to medium or remote or branch office environments.
The Hitachi UCP 6000 converged model integrates the recently launched Hitachi CB 2500 blade servers, and delivers unmatched price-performance for mission critical workloads.
Creating the Active Data Lake for Big Data Analytics
The hyper-converged architecture of the new Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform (HSP) provides cost-effective compute performance and on-demand capacity.
Capable of ingesting massive amounts of mixed data types across a distributed, clustered architecture, the simple, automated management of HSP allows elastic data growth by using Hitachi file system technology with open source management and virtualization software.
HSP is the ideal scale-out platform for Hadoop environments, allowing users to analyze data in place and eliminate the need to move large data sets to perform analytics functions for big data.
Automated, Application-Led Storage Provisioning and Data Protection
Hitachi Data Systems is also introducing and enhancing a wide range of software tools that will help users build the ITaaS infrastructure they desire, while delivering greater self-service capabilities to internal users.
These new application-aware solutions offer greater automation of, and protection for, critical customer workloads, reducing costs and complexity while increasing efficiency in software-defined environments.
“HDS has consistently delivered innovative IT solutions, with an emphasis on addressing industry pain points and helping customers achieve their business objectives.” said Sunil Pillai, Founder and Managing Director with iValue.
“Our continued partnership with Hitachi Data Systems has enabled us to make an impact within HDS’s extensive product line while helping our mutual customers achieves higher conformance to Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), avoiding over-provisioning, time over and enhancing productivity”.
