Hitachi Vantara Enhanced Unified Compute Platform Hardware and Software

Hitachi Vantara Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., announced hardware and software enhancements across the Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family of converged, hyperconverged and rack-scale systems, including NVMe SSD caching and GPU processor-based server options.

Unified Compute Platform CI

Certified applications ecosystem solutions optimized for mission-critical environments include SAP HANA, Oracle databases, VMware and big data analytics frameworks. By offering a complete family of UCP converged systems and integrated application solutions, the company is able to address any workload, at any scale, in multi-cloud environments.

UCP systems provide customers with simplified, standard platforms that are fast to deploy and to manage, with less risk by minimizing human error. They enable the agile infrastructure needed to modernize data centers, allowing customers to rapidly respond to evolving business needs while efficiently managing, governing, mobilizing, protecting and analyzing data to gain richer insights and drive better business outcomes.

Enhanced UCP family offerings
UCP systems use modular building blocks of infrastructure that are pretested and validated to meet specific needs and fast-changing business requirements. They allow customers to start small and grow systems with increments of cost-effective compute, network and storage components to optimize performance.

Unified Compute Platform Advisor (UCP Advisor), the IT management and orchestration software for the UCP family, supports automation over server, network and storage components. UCP Advisor with customized workflows lets IT staff move applications and workloads between clouds and UCP systems in a smart and automated way to rapidly deliver new IT services. The latest release of UCP Advisor continues to enhance automation, including policy-based provisioning to speed initial deployment with less risk.

Built on a modular converged architecture, Unified Compute Platform CI (UCP CI) systems provide a flexible, low-risk path to modern data center infrastructure. The systems with a management and automation toolset that uses UCP Advisor, enable the operational efficiencies of virtualization and increase the performance of mission-critical applications. They simplify the control of both virtual and physical infrastructure to support a range of enterprise and cloud workloads at any scale.

Advanced Server DS240

Enhancements to UCP CI systems include support for the recently launched all-flash and hybrid Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems. Compared to prior models, this VSP systems provide faster, more efficient performance, containers support and cross-platform AI analytics and IT automation software. Intel Corp.’s Skylake-based Advanced Server DS220 and DS240 servers deliver expanded scale-up and scale-out computational options to handle the demanding, performance requirements for virtualization, SAP and Oracle environments.

Unified Compute Platform HC (UCP HC) systems are a scalable, easy-to-deploy hyperconverged infrastructure appliance. Available as an all-inclusive solution, UCP HC uses VMware vSAN, the software that powers hyperconverged infrastructure, for simplicity, agility and fully-orchestrated installation, management and upgrades.

DS120 server

The Advanced Server DS225 with NVIDIA Tesla GPU support addresses opportunities that require advanced graphics capabilities such as VDI, CAD/CAE and collaborative workplaces, along with analytics solutions. Intel Optane NVMe SSD caching in the DS120 server provides performance and low latency transaction processing for critical applications and analytics environments. The higher capacity storage in the DS220 server addresses use cases such as test and development, branch office support, content repositories and file services.

Unified Compute Platform RS

Unified Compute Platform RS (UCP RS) is a rack-scale system designed to simplify the deployment of an agile data infrastructure at scale. When combined with VMware Cloud Foundation, the latest version of VMware, Inc.‘s integrated hybrid cloud platform, the integrated system enables customers to deploy a hybrid cloud with a fast time to market and pay-as-you-go economics.

New components and enhancements to UCP RS include the use of Skylake all-flash servers for improved performance and efficiency, and support for VMware vSAN. This lowers the cost for smaller deployments, bringing a simple, secure and agile cloud infrastructure to a new class of customers.

“We are partnering with Hitachi Vantara to speed the adoption of hyper-converged infrastructure powered by VMware vSAN to larger enterprises“, said Lee Caswell, VP, product, storage and availability business unit, VMware. “Hitachi Vantara offers unique integration with VMware solutions, including VMware vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation, to deliver a digital foundation for traditional and cloud native applications as enterprises look for developer-ready infrastructure with a sleek new operations model.“

Expanded applications ecosystem solutions
Applications ecosystem solutions, powered by the UCP family of systems, deliver pre-integrated, optimized and certified infrastructure solutions and reference architectures, combined with application-centric professional services.

Solution for the SAP HANA Platform simplifies the analysis of SAP HANA data as well as big data from multiple sources in real time to drive faster and more informed business decisions. The SAP HANA solution options include tailored data center integration (TDI) certifications with density and efficiency, scaling to 64 nodes per frame and featuring VSP flash storage systems to run the demanding SAP applications. New appliance certifications scale up to eight CPUs and 12TB, and are suited for SAP Business Suite 4 HANA (SAP S/4 HANA) to drive financials, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and other mission-critical enterprise operations. In addition, Hitachi has added resource forecasting analytics and threshold alerts to Hitachi server and storage adapters for the SAP HANA Cockpit centralized management console.

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A company’s solution for databases with Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) optimization offloads warm and cold data to a data lake consisting of a certified MongoDB cluster running on UCP RS systems. This can reduce the cost of software licensing, scale-out capability and hardware acquisitions while supporting analytics on Oracle EDW and MongoDB. The company‘s Pentaho Data Integration allows access to both existing EDW and secondary big data environments from a single tool.

Pretested, prevalidated infrastructure featuring certified Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub and MongoDB Enterprise compute clusters, complement Pentaho Data Integration for key use cases like cybersecurity. This reference architectures with certified infrastructure for Cloudera, Inc. and MongoDB provide customers with tested systems, expertise and best practices learned through years of experience in data management.

“It is critical that enterprise customers get the most value from all their data to grow their top line, connect their products and services, and protect their business. Together, Hitachi Vantara and Cloudera can help,” said Philippe Marinier, VP, business development, Cloudera. “The new reference architecture from Hitachi Vantara with certified infrastructure on Cloudera’s modern platform for machine learning and analytics optimized for the cloud can empower our joint customers to transform complex data into actionable insights to drive their digital transformation.“

“Hitachi UCP systems allow customers to respond quicker to business needs with a simplified, standard platform that is fast to deploy and easy to manage, with less risk,” said Bob Madaio, VP, infrastructure solutions marketing, Hitachi Vantara. “Together with enhanced, pretested application solutions, Hitachi’s converged infrastructure systems are helping customers ensure maximum ROI on the infrastructure running their most critical applications and analytics environments.“

All UCP systems and applications ecosystem solutions are either available globally or will be available in August.