Hitachi Vantara Expands Storage Portfolio With Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Hitachi Vantara LLC, subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., shared its vision for the future of hybrid cloud storage at the event The Road Ahead: Digital Infrastructure for the Data-Driven (registration required).

During presentations by Mark Ablett, president, digital infrastructure, and Radhika Krishnan, chief product officer, the company outlined steps it is taking to extend its storage virtualization capabilities to deliver a distributed hybrid cloud data fabric. The executives discussed a roadmap to combining hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions, unveiled today, with the software-defined Virtual Storage software for block, virtualized across distributed environments, from edge to core to cloud.

The hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions will help clients of all sizes cost-effectively meet the demands of enterprise, cloud native and AI applications, and lay the foundation for extending data fabrics to hybrid cloud environments.

“Today we are excited to announce enhancements to our portfolio that will play a key role in the future of hybrid cloud data strategies,” said Mark Ablett, president, digital infrastructure. “Our new VSP 5000 series and E-Series hybrid cloud products deliver performance, consolidation, and enterprise data services seamlessly on-prem, off-prem, and for cloud-based storage. Clients want agility and performance to meet the demands of digital business, and we’re delivering both.“

Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 Series models, VSP E-Series, and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) offerings are available with non-disruptive upgrade paths and cloud-like management tools.

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VSP E-Series delivers performance and capacity
The company introduced new versions of its VSP E590 and E790 storage solutions for SMEs. New hybrid storage options give clients the flexibility to consolidate diverse workloads in a single mid-range platform. Integrations with leading cloud services platforms also help clients lay the foundation for extending data fabrics to the cloud. Aligned with this hybrid cloud data virtualization strategy, moving forward these arrays will have common data services and virtualization from software-defined and cloud hosted solutions.

In addition to economical all-NVMe storage, clients can choose all-NVMe, all-SAS or a combination of them. The addition of SAS expansion to VSP E590 and E790 addresses low latency requirements for applications and affordability for small and midsized enterprise clients, ensuring clients never compromise performance while making use of high capacity, low-cost media for data retention.

Featuring a simple, self-install setup with embedded management, VSP E Series systems can be up and running in 30mn

The E-Series is integrated into the major hybrid cloud stacks to simplify the deployment and management of the data fabric from edge to core to cloud. The company announced integrations with Anthos, the Google Cloud solution for unified data management across on-premise, edge, and in multiple public clouds, and with Red Hat OpenShift, the enterprise Kubernetes platform. Hitachi also announced Hitachi Replication Plug-In for Containers, which enables enterprise data services in container environments for stateful storage with the company’s VSP and E-Series family.

Storage Plug-In for Containers scheme

VSP 5000 Series: Best gets better
The VSP 5000 Series is a data platform with the power to deliver business insights for digital transformation. Its expanded its enterprise features for clients who have large data requirements. New enterprise storage models, the VSP 5200 and 5600, accelerate application responsiveness and performance with a 42% improvement in data reduction efficiency, increasing more usable capacity. With end-to-end NVMe, the new VSP 5600 model smash records with 33 million IO/s and as low as 39μs of latency. These capabilities accelerate application response and increase datacenter consolidation opportunities. These arrays are also intelligent, with integrated real-time observability across the infrastructure stack with automated anomaly detection and root cause analysis.

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The VSP 5000 series storage models feature the same modern application development integrations as the E-Series models to extend the data fabric from the edge to the core and to the cloud.

Hitachi Modern Storage Assurance and ‘Data-in-Place Migration’
Organizations’ increasingly expect on-premises IT resources to offer cloud-like agility and scalability. Hitachi Vantara is delivering both attributes in the VSP 5000 Series with a ‘data in place’, non-disruptive upgrade path to the next gen of technology.

New to the VSP 5200 and VSP 5600, the firm’s Modern Storage Assurance additionally provides upgrades to the next gen VSP technology – simplifying the procurement process for several years. Modern Storage Assurance can be included in the original purchase of a VSP 5200 or VSP 5600 or as part EverFlex. EverFlex is the company‘s as-a-service offering that allows clients to consume hardware, software and services through a pay-per-use consumption model.

EverFlex enables clients to start small with the capacity and performance they need today, and to scale to the largest configurations for data center consolidation, while only paying for what they use.

HCP enhances unstructured data operations
Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) is an object storage software solution. Effective, it delivers a greater than 2x improvement in performance for cloud gen apps through new optimization settings that distribute the objects across the architecture more efficiently. A scale-out policy engine optimizes performance through data services that can be customized per use case or workload.

Hitachi Content Software for File, the recent expansion of firm’s object storage portfolio, also gained new capabilities. The solution supports ingest from Amazon S3 object storage for performance applications such as IoT sensors and video surveillance machines, which need to rapidly feed massive amounts of data into a central repository.

Hitachi Ops Center delivers enhanced AIO/s
The Hitachi Ops Center streamlines operations for distributed teams by applying AI and ML methodologies to reporting, performance optimization and intelligent data management for easy to use, cloud-based health monitoring system.

An integrated real-time analytics and automation capability provide up to a 70% reduction of manual storage management tasks and helps you get to root cause analysis up to 4x faster. Through the Ops Center, clients can not only safeguard data availability and simplify operations but also fine tune system performance to help reduce the organization’s overall carbon footprint by consuming less energy and cooling across the system.

Availability:

• VSP 5000, E-Series and Hitachi Content Platform are available for purchase WW from the company and its global partner network.

• All solutions are available through EverFlex, the firm’s XaaS consumption model offering the ability to flexibly scale in line with ambitions, while boosting agility and maximizing protection vs. Risk.

Endorsements for VSP Series Infrastructure
“From large, enterprise organizations to growing midsize businesses, modernizing the digital core of your business and simultaneously driving digital innovation is crucial to keep pace with the new demands of digital business,” said Ahsan Khan, CTO, ThinkOn, Inc., Canada’s only wholesale provider of storage, compute and networking resources. “The new E-Series from Hitachi Vantara is an excellent platform for those budding businesses looking to reinvent the role of infrastructure in their operations for more cloud-based and purpose-built solutions that optimize existing IT investments while promoting agility and flexibility to seamlessly grow with your business and data requirements.“

“One of our favorite aspects of the VSP 5000 Series is its seamless data migration capabilities due to the business-critical agendas hosted on the platform. Our last migration of more than a hundred physical servers was done without any outage or performance issues and without any complicated internal agreements about migration window or downtime,” said Jaroslav Javor, IT architecture manager, Avast Software s.r.o, provider digital security and privacy products. “The new VSP 5600 is the clear choice for our next gen architecture thanks to the seamless data in place upgrade, performance improvements, and remote tuning and performance management capabilities, allowing us to maintain 100% data availability for our critical solutions.“

“The flexibility of the new, hybrid E Series offering are what attracted us to this solution,” said Holger Böhn, manager IT infrastructure, akquinet AG, an end-to-end service provider based in Hamburg, Germany. “The combination of performance and cost-effective composability allows us to deliver the very best service to our customers while maximizing our data center investments.“

“Collaborating for more than 20 years, Broadcom and Hitachi Vantara are developing modern enterprise infrastructure solutions that combine industry-leading performance with autonomous SAN and storage technologies,” said Martin Skagen, VP, architecture and technology, Brocade storage networking division, Broadcom, Inc. “Brocade FC networking combined with Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform solutions leverage NVMe, analytics, and automation technologies to accelerate application performance, maximize infrastructure availability, and simplify management operations.“

“To keep pace in a highly competitive and evolving marketplace, today’s IT organizations need to not only efficiently meet today’s technical requirements, but continue to meet rapidly evolving business needs,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC. “To accomplish this; Hitachi Vantara’s performance, cloud-like agility and as a service consumption models come together to create a modernized digital infrastructure that empowers both traditional and next gen applications, drives new levels of efficiency and streamlines operations.“

Resources:
Blog: The Road Ahead: Digital Infrastructure For the Data-Driven    
Blog: When Innovative Storage Solutions Realign Your Business Around Data
Blog: Break Barriers, Not the Bank, With New Hitachi VSP E Series Midrange Storage
Blog: Drive Toward the Future With the New Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series
Video: VSP 5000 Series Introduction
Blog: High-Performance Reliable Object Storage for Today’s Most Demanding Applications