Hitachi Vantara Enhanced HCI Portfolio With Updates to Unified Compute Platform HC and RS

Hitachi Vantara LLC, subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., introduced enhancements and capabilities to its HCI portfolio with updates to Unified Compute Platform (UCP) HC and UCP RS.

These updates provide added benefits to customers including faster provisioning with UCP Advisor, certified support for SAP HANA workloads, Intel Cascade Lake Xenon refresh processors that increase performance, and enhanced lifecycle management capabilities that deliver non-disruptive upgrades.

“There is no doubt that Covid-19 will leave everlasting impacts on how people around the world do business and live their day-to-day lives. For IT, this means supporting larger mobile and remote workforces with federated collaboration, an elevated focus on infrastructure resiliency and cybersecurity, and accelerated digital transformation initiatives,” said Bobby Soni, president, digital infrastructure. “Hitachi Vantara is rapidly evolving our strategy to support CIOs and their teams, and our HCI solutions help them simplify digital infrastructure management as they grapple with today’s new realities.“

These updated HCI solutions unify cloud infrastructure management with interoperability across customers’ environments of traditional storage, HCI-powered hybrid clouds and public clouds. The latest offerings include a scalable and simplified foundation for hybrid cloud, allowing customers to rapidly scale out data center architecture designs when increased data center resources are required.

Through automation and intelligence, customers can accelerate innovation, improve productivity and reduce TCO across a variety of use cases including hybrid cloud, business-critical apps such as SAP HANA, VDI and DevOps. The company’s HCI portfolio is updated with enhanced day 0-2 management capabilities including upgraded lifecycle management that enables non-disruptive upgrades for the full HCI stack, including IP and SAN network switches.

These updates deliver benefits to customers including:

• Unified cloud management: Customers have the flexibility to build a cloud infrastructure with workload and data mobility across on-premises and public cloud environments. The firm’s UCP Advisor accelerates provisioning up to 80% faster compared to previous HCI management tools and reduces management complexity across the environment.

• Scalable performance: Greater performance, scale and density supports IT departments’ ability to rapidly scale data center resources for business-critical applications and lower operational overhead for better TCO. The updated HCI platforms provide certified support for SAP HANA workloads on HCI. Intel Cascade Lake Refresh Xeon processors increase performance for workload consolidation while avoiding resource contention issues. Theese HCI solutions help reduce Capex and Opex overhead with automation and data efficiency technologies.

• Simplified consumption: EverFlex from the company provides simple, elastic and comprehensive acquisition choices for the entire company’s portfolio, including the UCP Family, with consumption-based pricing models that align IT spend with business use and help lower costs by up to 20% ⁽¹⁾ with pay-as-you-go pricing. Customers can also accelerate time to production with pre-validated and optimized bundles and starter packs, including solutions enabling remote work.

• Streamlined Partner Sales Motion: The company’s HCI solution realized a 100% Y/Y growth. With the firm’s bundles and pre-validated reference architectures, partners can sell, speed up quoting and fulfill orders faster to deliver revenue and profit maximization while enabling error-free deployments. Additionally, the company offers customizable services for cross-selling and up-selling with other Hitachi IT portfolio products.

“We chose Hitachi UCP HC after evaluation vs. other hyperconverged vendor solutions,” said Vo Nguyen, IT manager, Seven System Vietnam JSC. “UCP HC’s all-in-one, single-vendor solution, with VMware vSAN integration, made it easy to meet our performance and availability needs. To be able to economically grow and scale as we expand our business closed the deal.“

“Hyperconverged infrastructure has quickly become an important option for many data centers, virtualizing and collapsing storage, networking and compute to simplify management,” said Enrico Signoretti, analyst, Gigaom Research. “Hitachi Vantara’s new HCI solutions hit the nail on the head by providing the right management tools and integrations to minimize initial deployment and improve day-2 operations.“

“Our longstanding relationship with Hitachi Vantara has helped customers modernize their data centers, from delivering more secure, scalable and compliant digital workspace infrastructure to dense, high-performance hyperconverged infrastructure supporting business-critical apps such as SAP HANA,” said Lee Caswell, VP, marketing, cloud platform business unit, VMware, Inc. “Hitachi Vantara’s updated hyperconverged solutions can provide reliable lifecycle management, policy-based automation, and a consistent experience across the software-defined data center.“

“Customers increasingly want the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure, but they don’t want another silo to manage or to worry about the complexity of moving data between multiple tiers of compute,” said Dan McConnell, SVP, product management, enterprise infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara. “For example, when customers are ready to move data from dev/test into production, they want a seamless way to do it. Hitachi Vantara’s enhanced HCI portfolio uniquely provides fully integrated solutions that allow customers to move data between different tiers of infrastructure easily and to scale the amount of storage needed, reducing complexity while improving productivity.“

Unified Compute Platform HC and Unified Compute Platform RS are available from the company and its network of business partners.

⁽¹⁾ Based on Hitachi Vantara internal testing and/or industry-standard benchmarks vs. published claims of competitive products

Resources:
Blog: Why IT Will Never Be the Same Again, by Bobby Soni, president, digital infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara
Blog: The Challenge of Increasing Cloud Agility While Maintaining Your Existing Systems, by Colin Gallagher, VP product marketing, digital infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara
Infographic: Automate to Innovate – Hitachi HCI Appliance     
Solution profile: Remote Workspace with Security and Compliance

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