Hitachi Vantara unveils a wide range of data-center products

Hitachi Vantara launched a wide range of new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) systems, software management, and automation tools at its Hitachi Next 2018 conference taking place in San Diego.

The move is meant to be a convergence of products, just as Hitachi Ventara as a company is going through a convergence. The U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese tech giant was formed last year by combining three business units: Hitachi Data Systems, the systems and storage infrastructure business; the Hitachi Insight Group IoT business; and the Pentaho Big Data business.

With on-premises hardware falling out of favor to the cloud, Hitachi Vantara is trying to help customers that keep on-prem systems get the most out of their systems and bring as much of the cloud experience to the data center.

“People are trying to right-size apps they want to manage rather than what they want in the cloud,” said Bob Madaio, vice president of infrastructure solutions marketing at Hitachi Vantara. “We tend to support customers that will use the cloud to augment them, but most of the data and apps are on prem.”

So, the focus becomes how to make on-prem systems more automated and how to make the process of spinning up new services faster.

“One reason people go to the cloud is when a line of business asks for services, it tends to go slower than the cloud. They want the experience to be the ability to light up a new service fast without having to move apps to the cloud,” he said.

Hitachi Vantara’s new and updated products

Hitachi Vantara has updated its Unified Compute Platform, or UCP, line of converged and hyperconverged infrastructure offerings with several new technologies, most notably an all-NVMe SSD storage solution.

The V124N comes with hyperconverged appliances, offering up to eight NVMe SSDs plus up to four 3D XPoint-based Intel Optane SSDs for high-performance caching of the SSDs. All told, that’s 72TB of all-flash capacity in a 1U appliance.

The company also introduced the Hitachi Advanced Server DS225 with Nvidia Tesla GPUs for applications requiring advanced graphics capabilities. The Hitachi Solution for Databases has been updated to improve overall performance and scalability. And the Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse now allows admins to offload workloads to Hadoop.

On the software side, Hitachi Vantara upgraded its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor IT management and orchestration software with new automated and rule-based deployment policies. It also offers newly certified SAP HANA appliances, and enhancements to its Smart Data Center solution that adds the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time analytics to further optimize all aspects of IT operations across data centers.

It’s all aimed at helping customers better manage what they keep on premises, said Madaio.

“Customers are thinking through the architectures they want to manage, looking where is HCI is more applicable,” he said. “They are looking at what they want to keep, improving by making it simpler to deploy and speed it up. For apps that require the highest availability, they are looking at how do they bring more flash and easier management into a converged infrastructure.”