Hitachi Vantara Outlines Vision for Hybrid Cloud Data Storage at 'The Road Ahead

Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure, data management and analytics, and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today shared its vision for the future of hybrid cloud data storage at the event ‘The Road Ahead: Digital Infrastructure for the Data-Driven’.

During presentations by President, Digital Infrastructure, Mark Ablett and Chief Product Officer, Radhika Krishnan the company outlined steps it is taking to extend its industry leading storage virtualization capabilities to deliver a distributed hybrid cloud data fabric. The executives discussed a roadmap to combining hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions, unveiled today, with the software defined Hitachi Virtual Storage Software for block, virtualized across distributed environments, from edge to core to cloud.

The new hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions will help clients of all sizes cost-effectively meet the demands of enterprise, cloud native and AI applications, and lay the foundation for extending data fabrics to hybrid cloud environments.

“Today we are excited to announce enhancements to our portfolio that will play a key role in the future of hybrid cloud data strategies,” said Mark Ablett, president of Digital Infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara. “Our new VSP 5000 series and E-Series hybrid cloud products deliver performance, consolidation, and enterprise class data services seamlessly on-prem, off-prem, and for cloud-based storage. Clients want agility and performance to meet the demands of digital business, and we’re delivering both.”

New Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 Series models, VSP E-Series, and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) offerings are available now with non-disruptive upgrade paths and cloud-like management tools.

Explore Today’s New Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Offerings

New VSP E-Series Delivers Performance and Capacity without Compromise

Hitachi Vantara today introduced new versions of its VSP E590 and E790 storage solutions for small and midsized enterprise clients. New hybrid storage options give clients the flexibility to consolidate diverse workloads in a single midrange platform. Integrations with leading cloud services platforms also help clients lay the foundation for extending data fabrics to the cloud. Aligned with our hybrid cloud data virtualization strategy, moving forward these arrays will have common data services and virtualization from our software defined and cloud hosted solutions.

In addition to economical all-NVMe storage, clients can now choose all-NVMe, all-SAS or a combination of the two. The addition of SAS expansion to VSP E590 and E790 addresses low latency requirements for applications and affordability for small and midsized enterprise clients, ensuring clients never compromise performance while making use of high capacity, low-cost media for data retention.

Featuring a simple, self-install setup with embedded management, VSP E Series systems can be up and running in 30 minutes.

The new E-Series is integrated into the major hybrid cloud stacks to simplify the deployment and management of the data fabric from edge to core to cloud. Hitachi Vantara announced integrations with Anthos, the Google Cloud solution for unified data management across on-premise, edge, and in multiple public clouds, and with Red Hat OpenShift, the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. Hitachi also announced Hitachi Replication Plug-In for Containers, which enables enterprise data services in container environments for stateful storage with the Hitachi VSP and E-Series family.

VSP 5000 Series: The Best Gets Better

The VSP 5000 Series is a data platform with the power to deliver business insights for digital transformation. Today, the VSP 5000 Series expanded its enterprise-class features for clients who have large data requirements. New enterprise storage models, the VSP 5200 and 5600, accelerate application responsiveness and performance with a 42% improvement in data reduction efficiency, increasing more usable capacity. With end-to-end NVMe, the new VSP 5600 model once again smash records with 33 million IOPS and as low as 39 microseconds of latency. These capabilities accelerate application response and increase datacenter consolidation opportunities. These arrays are also intelligent, with integrated real-time observability across the infrastructure stack with automated anomaly detection and root cause analysis.

The new VSP 5000 series storage models feature the same modern application development integrations as the new E-Series models to extend the data fabric from the edge to the core and to the cloud.

Hitachi Modern Storage Assurance and Data-in-Place Migration

Organizations increasingly expect on-premises IT resources to offer cloud-like agility and scalability. Hitachi Vantara is delivering both attributes in the new VSP 5000 Series with a ‘data in place’, non-disruptive upgrade path to the next generation of technology.

New to the VSP 5200 and VSP 5600, Hitachi Modern Storage Assurance additionally provides seamless upgrades to the next generation VSP technology – simplifying the procurement process for several years. Hitachi Modern Storage Assurance can be included in the original purchase of a new VSP 5200 or VSP 5600 or as part EverFlex. EverFlex is Hitachi Vantara’s as-a-service offering that allows clients to consume hardware, software and Services through a pay-per-use consumption model.

EverFlex enables clients to start small with only the capacity and performance they need today, and to scale to the largest configurations for data center consolidation, while only paying for what they use.

Hitachi Content Platform Enhances Unstructured Data Operations

Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) is Hitachi Vantara’s object storage software solution. Effective today, HCP delivers a greater than 2x improvement in performance for cloud gen apps through new optimization settings that distribute the objects across the architecture more efficiently. A new scale-out policy engine optimizes performance through data services that can be customized per use case or workload.

Hitachi Content Software for File, the most recent expansion of our object storage portfolio, also gained new capabilities today. The solution now supports ingest from Amazon S3 object storage for high performance applications such as IoT sensors and video surveillance machines, which need to rapidly feed massive amounts of data into a central repository.

Hitachi Ops Center Delivers Enhanced AIOps

The new Hitachi Ops Center streamlines operations for distributed teams by applying AI and ML methodologies to reporting, performance optimization and intelligent data management for easy to use, cloud-based health monitoring system.

An integrated real-time analytics and automation capability provide up to a 70% reduction of manual storage management tasks and helps you get to root cause analysis up to 4X faster. Through the Hitachi Ops Center, clients can not only safeguard data availability and simplify operations but also fine tune system performance to help reduce the organization’s overall carbon footprint by consuming less energy and cooling across the system.

Availability

Hitachi Vantara’s VSP 5000, E-Series and Hitachi Content Platform are available for purchase worldwide now from Hitachi Vantara and its global partner network. All solutions are available through EverFlex, Hitachi Vantara’s XaaS consumption model offering the ability to flexibly scale in line with ambitions, while boosting agility and maximizing protection against risk.

Endorsements for Hitachi VSP Series Infrastructure

“From large, enterprise organizations to growing midsize businesses, modernizing the digital core of your business and simultaneously driving digital innovation is crucial to keep pace with the new demands of digital business,” said Ahsan Khan, CTO at ThinkOn, Canada's only wholesale provider of storage, compute and networking resources. “The new E-Series from Hitachi Vantara is an excellent platform for those budding businesses looking to reinvent the role of infrastructure in their operations for more cloud-based and purpose-built solutions that optimize existing IT investments while promoting agility and flexibility to seamlessly grow with your business and data requirements."

“One of our favorite aspects of the VSP 5000 Series is its seamless data migration capabilities due to the business-critical agendas hosted on the platform. Our last migration of more than a hundred physical servers was done without any outage or performance issues and without any complicated internal agreements about migration window or downtime,” said Jaroslav Javor, IT Architecture manager at Avast Software, a leader in digital security and privacy products. “The new VSP 5600 is the clear choice for our next generation architecture thanks to the seamless data in place upgrade, performance improvements, and remote tuning and performance management capabilities, allowing us to maintain 100% data availability for our critical solutions.”

“The flexibility of the new, hybrid E Series offering are what attracted us to this solution,” said Holger Böhn, manager IT infrastructure at akquinet, an end-to-end service provider based in Hamburg, Germany. “The combination of performance and cost-effective composability allows us to deliver the very best service to our customers while maximizing our data center investments.”

“Collaborating for more than 20 years, Broadcom and Hitachi Vantara are developing modern enterprise infrastructure solutions that combine industry-leading performance with autonomous SAN and storage technologies,” said Martin Skagen, vice president of architecture and technology, Brocade Storage Networking division, Broadcom. “Brocade Fibre Channel networking combined with Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform solutions leverage NVMe, analytics, and automation technologies to accelerate application performance, maximize infrastructure availability, and simplify management operations.”

“To keep pace in a highly competitive and evolving marketplace, today’s IT organizations need to not only efficiently meet today’s technical requirements, but continue to meet rapidly evolving business needs,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. “To accomplish this; Hitachi Vantara’s performance, cloud-like agility and as a service consumption models come together to create a modernized digital infrastructure that empowers both traditional and next generation applications, drives new levels of efficiency and streamlines operations.”