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."