Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced a leap forward in its technology leadership for delivering software-defined infrastructures that enable customers to simplify IT and free data from traditional hardware and location constraints, making it more accessible for all existing and new analytics-driven workloads. These new and enhanced offerings have been designed to help customers achieve greater levels of information access through virtualized, hyper-converged and scale-out platforms that are built to accelerate the journey to IT as a service (ITaaS) through application-led, software-defined architectures. Hitachi Data Systems also announced today new solutions and services to make society safer, smarter and healthier.

To effectively unlock the value of a software-defined infrastructure, technology must simplify operations through automation, drive insight through better access to information, and improve agility through abstraction that turns fixed assets into flexible resources.

Hitachi Data Systems is delivering on those goals by:

• Extending its Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) to an expanded Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family
• Expanding the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family to cover core to edge or small to large converged and hyper-converged infrastructure models
• Introducing the Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform (HSP) for fast-growing data analytics workloads
• Bringing to market new software to automate the provisioning and protection of application environments

Storage Virtualization to the Masses
With the newest additions to the Hitachi VSP family -- the G200, G400, G600 and the upcoming G800 -- Hitachi Data Systems is the only IT vendor to address customer workload requirements from entry to the mainframe with a single software stack. Extending the reach of powerful software capabilities that are built into Hitachi SVOS allows the entire VSP family to offer native heterogeneous storage virtualization and multi-site active-active storage -- as well as fully compatible data migration, replication and management. Customers now have the ability to choose systems based on the necessary capacity, performance and price required to meet their business goals, not because of functional difference.

Customers looking at smaller systems will now get access to the same virtualization technology that has existed in prior HDS high-end systems that have achieved the highest overall product and use-case specific scores within Gartner's Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays1. These proven capabilities provide a leap forward in consolidating and simplifying user environments of all sizes and allow simpler migrations, easier management and full resiliency without the complication of appliances.

Best of Breed Converged Platforms for Any Workload
The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) portfolio has been expanded with new hyper-converged and converged infrastructure models that now cover customers' needs to rapidly and more easily support core to edge IT workloads. The latest additions to the UCP family include the hyper-converged Hitachi UCP 1000 for VMware EVO:RAIL, and the converged Hitachi UCP 2000, both use new rack servers and target small to medium or remote or branch office environments. The Hitachi UCP 6000 converged model integrates the recently launched Hitachi CB 2500 blade servers, and delivers unmatched price-performance for mission critical workloads. The UCP family, with industry leading Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director infrastructure automation software, allows customers to drive operational efficiencies through rapid deployment and provisioning of infrastructure for managing an agile data center, prepared to change workloads to match business needs.

Creating the Active Data Lake for Big Data Analytics
The hyper-converged architecture of the new Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform (HSP) provides cost-effective compute performance and on-demand capacity. Capable of ingesting massive amounts of mixed data types across a distributed, clustered architecture, the simple, automated management of HSP allows elastic data growth by using Hitachi file system technology with open source management and virtualization software. HSP is the ideal scale-out platform for Hadoop environments, allowing users to analyze data in place and eliminate the need to move large data sets to perform analytics functions for big data.

Automated, Application-Led Storage Provisioning and Data Protection
Hitachi Data Systems is also introducing and enhancing a wide range of software tools that will help users build the ITaaS infrastructure they desire, while delivering greater self-service capabilities to internal users. These new application-aware solutions offer greater automation of, and protection for, critical customer workloads, reducing costs and complexity while increasing efficiency in software-defined environments.

Hitachi Automation Director, a new application that works with the Hitachi Command Suite management infrastructure, provides configurable best-practice-based service templates for simple, application-specific provisioning of storage resources to databases, applications and VDI environments. Built-in support for role-based access control means that, once established, these templates can be used by business users in a move to self-service provisioning.

As a lightweight complement to Hitachi Command Suite, Hitachi Infrastructure Director is a new storage configuration and management application that uses the new VSP systems' APIs to provide simple, intuitive management, guided by a built-in recommendation engine, for environments in which simplicity is more important than the need for manual control of every detail. Hitachi Infrastructure Director gives users the power to direct simplified management operations to rapidly deploy new storage systems and services for the new models in the VSP family.

With the ability to automate data protection and provide granular control of storage-based copies, Hitachi Data Instance Director simplifies data protection through automation and orchestration of Hitachi storage-based snapshot, clone and replication technologies, in addition to live backup, continuous data protection, and archive capabilities under a single platform. Data Instance Director provides a simple interface that matches data protection service levels to business priorities using a unique, whiteboard-style interface.

"The fundamentals of IT are changing. Whether it is the adoption of 'third platform' technologies and striking the proper balance among the different modes of IT, or the ongoing move to providing IT as a service, there is real change taking place, all while our customers are trying to move to ITaaS," said Sean Moser, senior vice president global portfolio and product management, Hitachi Data Systems. "Customers are looking for ways to be more agile and flexible to gain a competitive advantage. Hitachi is delivering a new generation of software-defined technologies built to support the changing needs of customer application environments to deliver on those goals and connect what works today with what's next."

"Attaining higher utilization on clusters and storage pools is critical for us, as is having a single point of support," said James Hanley, vice president and general manager for cloud, platform and data center at CSC. "With HDS, we are able to deploy an enterprise-class converged infrastructure through automated orchestration of our server, network and storage resources."