Hitachi Vantara: Solutions to Simplify Private Cloud and Extend Data Services to Hybrid Cloud

Hitachi Vantara LLC introduced multiple hybrid cloud products and services that deliver agility, scalability, and flexibility for private and hybrid cloud operating models with the reliability and trust that the its customers experience today.

Hybrid cloud products and services
The right cloud strategy accelerates an organization’s ability to deliver data-driven experiences by providing on-demand access to a host of data processing, management, analytics, and storage applications. But cloud is complex, with different operating models, legacy infrastructure, a shortage of cloud talent, and issues with security and compliance. The company meets its customers wherever they are on their cloud journey and supports them with innovative cloud operating models and performance and resiliency.

It announced hybrid cloud products and services engineered for data-driven organizations who want to automate and simplify their infrastructure and operations to capture the value of the cloud operating model across on-prem, near-cloud, and public cloud.

VSP E1090

Virtual Storage S oftware Block (VSS Block), a software-defined data platform that extends our virtual storage platform to cloud native applications
VSP E1090, next gen mid-range storage array with new virtual storage scale out capabilities
Hitachi Ops Center Clear Sight, an AI-driven cloud management tool to support Virtual Storage Platform with simplified cloud-based reporting and analytics
Hitachi Cloud Connect, to deliver a near-cloud solution with deep integration into public cloud extending the data fabric to support cloud applications from the leading public cloud providers
Unified Compute Platform RS, the latest hyperconverged ‘cloud in a box’ offering and our cloud data protection appliance to ensure your data is secure across your hybrid cloud operating model

“We are accelerating the pace of delivering nw hybrid cloud products and services t enable our customers to find innovative ways to enhance their data-driven outcomes today, and in the near future,” said Mark Ablett, president, digital infrastructure business unit. “By enabling the right cloud strategy with greater automation and simplicity, we allow our customers to divert valuable resources and talent that can be used on AI and data analytics to help them accelerate their ability to find new ways to improve the digital experience of their business.”

Software-defined data platform extends Hitachi storage platform to cloud native applications
The Virtual Storage Software Block (VSS Block) is a software-defined data platform that provides cloud agility and scalable storage support for traditional and cloud-native applications running on commodity x86 servers. Running on the company’s universal Storage Virtualization OS (SVOS), it provides customers with a single data plane across our mid-range, enterprise, and SDS portfolio. VSS Block will connect to firm’s near-cloud offerings and ultimately extend into the public cloud.

Leveraging the company’s patented Polyphase Erasure Coding, VSS Block provides improved data read performance and increased efficiency over traditional erasure coding schemes. It supports both mirroring and erasure coding for performance and efficiency and is flexible and easily compatible with traditional storage environments with both iSCSI and FC host connections.

Near-cloud data services for cloud applications
Cloud Connect enables customers to realize the best of both worlds with enterprise storage speed and reliability paired with public cloud compute provisioning and scaling. Leveraging the benefits of near-cloud hosted environments with highly connected data centers for hybrid cloud use cases including compute scaling, data protection, and DR, Cloud Connect enables the extension of your data fabric to near-cloud with the ability to support cloud resident applications in Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Cloud Connect delivers enterprise performance and data services for cloud-based applications with reliabilitry, establishing the client’s ownership of their data with seamless data services between on-premises data centers and cloud storage.

The Cloud Connect at Equinix offering allows customers to locate VSP enterprise storage at Equinix International Business Exchange data centers WW and includes the option for customers to procure this solution through one agreement and one invoice, simplifying and accelerating their time to market. By leveraging Equinix IBXÒ data centers and Equinix Fabric to interconnect sources of data to applications, VSP enables organizations to locate their data next to clouds while still maintaining control and enabling applications such as data protection and backup for hybrid and multi cloud data availability.

VSP E1090 mid-range system delivers performance, capacity, simplified management and clustering for scale
The addition to the firm‘s mid-range portfolio, VSP E1090 delivers innovation and expansion to support larger configurations and broader consolidation. Delivering the lowest latency of any NVMe mid-range storage on the market at 41µs and performance of 8.4 million IO/s, non-disruptive data-in-place migration, simplified monitoring and management and quick self-install, the VSP E1090 provides performance, capacity, resilience, and peace of mind. Hitachi Replication Plug-in for Containers automates storage replication between Kubernetes clusters and storage systems located at different sites, enabling your organization to take a self-service approach.

VSP E series brings more enterprise capabilities to mid-range buyers with the firm’s engineered technology for data reduction performance and non-disruptive, data in place upgrades to next gen platforms. Hitachi Virtual Storage Scale Out enables customers to cluster VSP arrays to scale performance and capacity to start small and quickly adjust in line with the growth of your applications and business. The VSP E series supports clustering of up to 65 nodes and 130 controllers. Powered by the company’s Ops Center, they operate as a single virtual system to hosts, delivering federated management, data mobility, data protection and automation across all nodes in a cluster, including virtualized 3rd party arrays.

VSP Storage Management delivers an AI-enabled, flexible storage management architecture that enables ease of use through analytics and automation across systems and clusters that seamlessly adopts to meet firm’s IT requirements. VSP Embedded Management promises rapid setup and provisioning of mid-range arrays without need for additional software installation. VSP E Series is self-installable and can be up and running in 30mn or less. Hitachi Modern Storage Assurance also ensures you have the latest VSP technology, easing purchasing and lifecycle management to take the uncertainty out of your next upgrade and allowing you to scale as needed delivering IT agility and maximizing investments.

Hyperconverged ‘Cloud in a Box’ for rapid deployment of cloud-native application infrastructure
The Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family of converged and hyperconverged solutions provides ‘cloud in a box’ functionality, enabling businesses to improve application release time, enhance operational simplicity and reduce costs with cloud flexibility, intelligent automation, and scalable performance. Delivering a flexible hybrid cloud platform, the new factory integrated Unified Compute Platform RS (UCP RS) powered by VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu is designed to increase business agility and deliver operational consistency across on-premises and public cloud environments.

In addition, the company‘s joint solution with Cisco, Hitachi Adaptive Solutions, includes the latest in VSP Storage and supports Cisco’s recently introduced UCS X-Series Compute, all managed by the Cisco Intersight hybrid cloud operations platform.

AI-Driven cloud infrastructure management
Hitachi Ops Center provides a centralized, integrated architecture for the consolidation of multiple storage silos and administrative tools, delivering a unified management service across data configuration, mobility, and protection. The company’s debuted Ops Center Clear Sight, a cloud-based, AI-driven app for monitoring assets from anywhere. Ops Center Clear Sight enables administrators to observe, analyze and optimize VSP storage infrastructure remotely, and AI-driven insights show up-to-date inventory asset views, health status, risk management, and capacity planning. Powered by Remote Ops, it can resolve up to 90% of support issues using predictive analysis before they affect your environment.

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Automated As-a-Service operations with EverFlex
For customers seeking to purchase more of their IT resources as-a-service, the company offers EverFlex, a portfolio of on demand, subscription, and managed service solutions. It added Hitachi Infrastructure Orchestration as-a-service to the EverFlex portfolio. This offering extends the firm‘s storage management and automation expertise to complex, multi-site IT environments. It enhances traditional operations with ML, AI, business process management, integration, and IT process automation software, and services to provide continuous insights and intelligence about IT environments. The Infrastructure Orchestration Platform helps create service-based infrastructures that facilitate autonomous, ‘self-driving’ IT operations that adapt to changing requirements for ongoing infrastructure modernization.

Hybrid cloud data protection
The firm provides a variety of data protection offerings delivering reliable data accessibility across data stores from the Ops Center Protector to integrations with our trusted partners. Designed to manage and protect cloud-native technologies, the Commvault HyperScale X for Hitachi Data Protection Suite accelerates hybrid cloud adoption with an integrated solution that delivers comprehensive data protection across applications, databases, public cloud environments, hypervisors, OSs, and storage arrays from a single, extensible platform.

“The speed, efficiency and availability of Hitachi’s VSP E-series storage solution with Hitachi Ops Center is a perfect fit for our business requirements,” said Benedikt Hartl, head, IT managed services, Pöttinger Landtechnik GmbH, one of Europe’s manufacturers of agricultural machinery. “The easy usability of Hitachi Ops Center means we can manage and provision storage much faster and gain a rapid overview of the most important performance data and we’re looking forward to exploring the new capabilities provided by Ops Center Clear Sight.”

“The resilience and reliability provided by Hitachi Vantara’s range of VSP enterprise and mid-range storage solutions has been cornerstone to our business and ensuring our customers receive a world-class experience across our platforms,” said Brian Mathis, head, server and storage platform, Suva, the Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund. “As we continue to evolve and invest in modern infrastructure solutions, we’re very excited about Hitachi’s block and file storage ambitions to help us improve operations for our distributed workloads and applications.“

“Our storage team needs to be agile, competitive and proactive as we oversee multiple data centers and different types of applications so a central management tool has been crucial for fast provisioning of daily tasks and simplified deployment,” said Utku Sert, director, infrastructure operations, Turkcell, a large telecom provider in Turkey. “We are running a dynamic environment with lots of changes to performance and capacity usage day by day. With Hitachi Ops Center, we can get all the important parameters such IO/s, transfer rates and response time for each component level, helping us to monitor deeply on any level with weekly reports that shows capacity usage, processors status, physical health status and detail reports of each storage component in the environment.”

“In today’s digital age, automation and data management should be harnessed by all. To deliver the best experience to our customers, we have embarked on a digital transformation journey by addressing the company’s infrastructure. Singapore Pools implemented a cloud-based ERP system, supported by a data lake that helps separate and protect its data, which is growing exponentially due to the digitization of its services,” said Yeo Teck Guan, chief business technology officer, Singapore Pools, a socially responsible gaming company. “During this transition, Hitachi Ops Center has been crucial to our daily operations by incorporating AI and predictive analytics. We look forward to the new Hitachi Ops Center Clear Sight that can boost our performance further. The proliferation of AI within the company, coupled with a push to institute a culture that embraces digital transformation and employee empowerment through IT adoption, allowed us to deliver seamless customer experience.”

“Utilizing Hitachi Ops Center to automate our day-to-day tasks like Lun provisioning without human intervention and Hitachi replication technologies for our DR efforts has been key to streamlining our operations,” said Deniz Armen, manger, cloud storage technologies, Garanti BBVA, Turkey’s second largest private bank. “Through Ops Center Protector, we reduced GAD and HUR operations time from 3-4 hour to 15 min and with the help of Ops Center Analyzer, Garanti BBVA can customize and set alarms to match business KPIs, such as RPO time for replication or CPU utilization of the systems to ensure maximum uptime with minimal human intervention.”

“Given the highly sensitive nature of our clients’ data, performance, availability and security are vital, but the flexibility of hybrid cloud models are increasingly in demand to match the requirements of modern application architectures, and that adds complexity,” said Jung-Kwon Cho, VP, DX business division, Hyosung Information Systems, a large Unified Compute Platform (UCP) partner in Korea. “Hitachi’s UCP RS hybrid cloud platform addresses that complexity by providing an automated, scalable solution to consistently run applications anywhere. The new UCP RS is an excellent addition to the portfolio, giving our customers improved agility, complete control over their mission critical data, and seamless workload mobility. Add to that extensive collaboration from our partner Hitachi Vantara, just the type of support we need when managing complex projects.”

“Hitachi Vantara customers are challenged with managing and accessing large volumes of data when and where they need it. Their need to transition to a cloud environment will drive greater flexibility and reliability while reducing medium- and long-term operational costs,” said Jeremy Deutsch, president, AsiaPac, Equinix, Inc. “By collaborating with Equinix, Hitachi Vantara offers storage and management services to support customers’ hybrid- and multi-cloud requirements on a global scale.”

“By combining Hitachi Vantara and VMware technologies we can address the primary challenges customers face with traditional Hybrid Cloud environments,” said John Gilmartin, SVP and GM, cloud storage and data, VM ware, Inc. “Hitachi’s UCP RS and VMware Cloud Foundation can deliver the agility, operational consistency and efficiency to reduce cost and complexity while improving time to market with new applications and offerings.”

“Enterprises across the board are realizing the benefits of hybrid cloud to best serve their data and applications needs but no two environments are the same and data operations can become stifled across data silos,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC. “Whether you’re just beginning or have an established multi-cloud environment, Hitachi Vantara’s new infrastructure solutions deliver a variety of options to help connect data and applications seamlessly from edge to core to cloud with the operational agility and as a service offerings of the public cloud.”

“The first requirement for any modern data management solution is that it needs to support modern workloads,” said John Tavares, VP, WW channels alliances, Commvault Systems, Inc. “With Commvault HyperScale X for Hitachi Data Protection Suite you have unmatched scalability, security and resiliency to accelerate an organization’s digital transformation journey as they move to hybrid cloud, container and virtualized environments.”