HDS: Hitachi Enterprise Cloud Changes Game for Enterprise Cloud Deployment

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., announced three ways to improve and accelerate digital transformation initiatives.

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Current market offerings lack flexibility and choice for customers, forcing IT to face on their own a gauntlet of obstacles and dead ends.

To address this, the company has introduced:

Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC) for organizations that choose private and hybrid cloud to automate data center operations and application delivery.
Hitachi Management Automation Strategy, which helps organizations simplify the management of their infrastructure.
Enhancements to Unified Compute Platform (UCP) 2000 and UCP HC for organizations that want to transform and modernize their IT infrastructure with economical and open converged and hyperconverged systems.

The application-specific, ready-to-use HEC platform combines pre-engineered, pre-built service catalogs with a dedicated converged platform, software and HDS-and/or partner-delivered services, helping users reduce operational costs and accelerating private and hybrid cloud deployments.

Available, the first instantiation of the HEC family, Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize Suite leverages the VMware vRealize Air Cloud Management Platform (CMP). The solution is available on or off premises in a traditional acquisition model or a usage and outcome-based managed cloud solution.

“Hitachi’s announcement today is a great example of the Vmware vRealize platform accelerating the cloud journey for the enterprise. Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize Suite is built with first-class server and storage infrastructure. The platform creates a powerful on-ramp for our mutual customers to leverage VMware vRealize Suite as their cloud management platform in order to lower operational costs and increase business agility.” said Rob Smoot, VP, product marketing, cloud management business unit, VMware, Inc.

The Hitachi Management Automation Strategy delivers infrastructure management software that meets the simplification imperative driven by cloud adoption. It also supports the motivation to consume IT as a service (ITaaS), whether applications are traditional or in the next generation.

This strategy is a growing portfolio of automation-focused software that includes UCP Advisor, which delivers simplified converged management for individual and multiple UCP 2000 systems.

“Intelligence, agility and customer-centricity are the three main business imperatives in the drive toward digital transformation and IT has a pivotal role to play in its success or failure. Driving to greater infrastructure agility to deliver on those imperatives is a challenge for IT teams. The automation and simplified management stipulated in the Hitachi Management Automation Strategy are central to meeting those challenges.” said Eric Hanselman, chief analyst, 451 Research.

In addition to the availability of the UCP Advisor software, there are enhancements to UCP performance, scale and ecosystem support that create valuable new options for customers. Both UCP 2000 and UCP HC systems support faster Broadwell processors and have optional support for Data Ingestor, Hitachi Content Platform and WAN Optimizer to provide customizable solutions.

UCP 2000 also sees 8X server scalability, now to 128 nodes, and a number of networking and security enhancements. Furthermore, HDS has extended the system to support OpenStack environments. UCP HC expands with a high capacity 2U/1-node hybrid and all-flash system with up to 26TB of usable flash capacity, extending the ability of the hyperconverged portfolio to deliver high performance and scale for analytics and transaction-oriented applications among other real-world functions.

Further extending choice and flexibility to customers, the company also rolled out several new as-a-service managed cloud offerings, including Storage as a Service (STaaS), Compute as a Service solutions, a as-a-service analytics solution for IT service management and operations, and new choices for remote operations services. The firm also announced that its Backup as a Service, Archive as a Service, and DR as a Service provide complete approaches to data protection.

“Digital transformation is the catalyst that promotes new types of innovation and creativity, improves customer experience and reinvents the business model and business process. Hitachi Data Systems is committed to providing effective and practical alternatives that can accelerate business transformation and break down the obstacles facing IT. Hitachi Enterprise Cloud provides more options than ever before to help organizations perform their digital transformation,” said Devangi Patel, VP, cloud go-to-market, HDS.