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HDS Entering Into Software-Defined Infrastructure

From entry to mainframe

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced a leap forward in its technology for delivering software-defined infrastructures that enable customers to simplify IT and free data from traditional hardware and location constraints, making it more accessible for all existing and new analytics-driven workloads.

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.

HDS also announced new solutions and services to make society safer, smarter and healthier.

To effectively unlock the value of a software-defined infrastructure, technology must simplify operations through automation, drive insight through better access to information, and improve agility through abstraction that turns fixed assets into flexible resources.

HDS is delivering on those goals by:

 

Storage Virtualization to the Masses
With the newest additions to the Hitachi VSP family – the G200, G400, G600 and the upcoming G800 – HDS addresses customer workload requirements from entry to the mainframe with a single software stack. Extending the reach of 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 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 that have achieved the highest overall product and use-case specific scores within Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays. These capabilities provide a leap forward in consolidating and simplifying user environments of all sizes and allow simpler migrations, easier management and resiliency without the complication of appliances.

Converged Platforms for Any Workload
The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) portfolio has been expanded with new hyper-converged and converged infrastructure models that now cover customers’ needs to rapidly and more easily support core to edge IT workloads. The latest additions to the UCP family include the hyper-converged Hitachi UCP 1000 for VMware EVO:RAIL, and the converged UCP 2000, both use new rack servers and target small to medium or remote or branch office environments. The UCP 6000 converged model integrates the recently launched CB 2500 blade servers, and delivers price-performance for mission critical workloads. The UCP family, with in Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director infrastructure automation software, allows customers to drive operational efficiencies through rapid deployment and provisioning of infrastructure for managing an agile data center, prepared to change workloads to match business needs.

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 a 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
The company is also introducing and enhancing a 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.

Hitachi Automation Director, a new application that works with the Hitachi Command Suite management infrastructure, provides configurable best-practice-based service templates for simple, application-specific provisioning of storage resources to databases, applications and VDI environments. Built-in support for role-based access control means that, once established, these templates can be used by business users in a move to self-service provisioning.

As a lightweight complement to Command Suite, Infrastructure Director is a new storage configuration and management application that uses the new VSP systems’ APIs to provide simple management, guided by a built-in recommendation engine, for environments in which simplicity is more important than the need for manual control of every detail. Infrastructure Director gives users the power to direct simplified management operations to deploy new storage systems and services for the new models in the VSP family.

With the ability to automate data protection and provide granular control of storage-based copies, Hitachi Data Instance Director simplifies data protection through automation and orchestration of Hitachi storage-based snapshot, clone and replication technologies, in addition to live backup, CDP, and archive capabilities under a single platform. Data Instance Director provides a simple interface that matches data protection service levels to business priorities using a unique, whiteboard-style interface.

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 Sean Moser, SVP global portfolio and product management, HDS. “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.

For us to truly unlock the value of software-defined storage, the chosen technology must simplify operations through automation, drive insight for more flexible and robust access to data and create agility through abstraction by making fixed resources flexible. Hitachi offers a portfolio to make our goal of a software-defined infrastructure a reality,” said Darius Harris, senior IT manager, Nedbank Ltd, South Africa. “In a big move toward this goal, Hitachi is extending its Storage Virtualization OS (SVOS) to an expanded Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family, essentially bringing the power and potential of storage virtualization within reach to organizations like ours.”

Attaining higher utilization on clusters and storage pools is critical for us, as is having a single point of support,” said James Hanley, VP and GM for cloud, platform and data center, Computer Sciences Corp.With HDS, we are able to deploy an enterprise converged infrastructure through automated orchestration of our server, network and storage resources.”

The Hitachi UCP technologies will help us stay ahead in the markets, fine tune what we need to supply to best meet customer needs, and support a most efficient business model,” said Andreas Kranabitl, MD for SPAR’s information and communication services (ICS). “We at SPAR are now wisely prepared to meet and proactively address any changes and growth.”

As a long-time HDS partner, we are accustomed to the company setting the bar high,” said Nicholas Laine, director and office of the CTO, ESI Technologies, Inc.They do not disappoint with their new software-defined storage platform, delivering the agility, performance and scalability needed to meet the demand for current and future applications.

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