Hitachi Vantara unveils new options for SAS, software-defined storage

Hitachi Vantara, which has been relatively quiet on the news front lately, today introduced several new enterprise and midrange packages to its storage portfolio. 

The Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 Series models, VSP E-Series, and Hitachi Content Platform offerings are now generally available with new cloud-based management tools, the company said.  

A little background: For years, Tokyo-based Hitachi was one of those corporations whose business customers were generally older-school users and not necessarily first-movers in new-gen IT. When the company spun out Hitachi Vantara in 2017, it was the result of the convergence of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho around new-gen storage systems. It also was based in Santa Clara, Calif., not in Japan. The idea was to create a separate new-generation company in Silicon Valley to build next-generation IT hardware and software, and it’s been successful thus far.

In this new set of storage products, HV has designed new systems aimed at mid-range businesses and installed high-end enterprise functionality in them, Chief Product Officer Radhika Krishnan told ZDNet.

“CIOs need a unified view of their data, and a single pane of glass through which to manage and optimize the underlying data infrastructure,” Krishnan said. “That requires a data fabric that seamlessly extends from on-premises resources into the cloud, and which mimics the scalability, simplicity, and convenience of cloud in their own data centers.

“What we’ve done in this instance with Hitachi is that we’re actually taking all of the very high-end capabilities — the resiliency, the architecture, and other capabilities, and bringing them to the mid-range. All-NVMe storage can cost you a pretty penny. Instead, you now have the ability to add a fast expansion to an all-SAS configuration, all NVMe integration, or a hybrid, which changes the affordability profile and the flexibility profile.”

The new products may indeed be extensions of older-school storage, but there’s a large market for that out there, and HV keeps going for it. For newer-gen companies, HV also has certified some of its new systems for Google Cloud Platform and Red Hat OpenShift, Krishnan said.

Details on the updates to Hitachi Vanara’s VSP 5000, VSP E-Series and Hitachi Content Platform announced Oct. 12 include the following: 

VSP E590 and E790 storage arrays for small and midsize enterprise clients: These new hybrid versions of the company’s frontline storage arrays offer options to consolidate diverse workloads in a single midrange platform. Clients can now choose all-NVMe, all-SAS, or a combination of the two. The addition of SAS expansion to VSP E590 and E790 addresses low-latency requirements for applications and affordability, the company said. 

VSP 5000 series: New enterprise storage models for clients who have large data requirements include the introduction of the VSP 5200 and 5600, which accelerate application responsiveness and performance with a 42% improvement in data reduction efficiency, according to HV. 

Hitachi Virtual Storage Software for Block is HV’s software-defined storage package. The first cloud partner will be AWS.

Hitachi Replication Plug-In for Containers enables enterprise data services in container environments for stateful storage with the Hitachi VSP and E-Series family.

Hitachi Innovation Assurance and Data-in-Place Migration: On-premises IT resources that offer cloud-like agility and scalability are available in the new VSP 5000 Series and E Series with data in place, the non-disruptive upgrade path to the next generation of technology. New to the VSP 5000 Series, Hitachi Innovation Assurance additionally provides automated upgrades to all future enhancements of the latest VSP technology, simplifying the procurement process for several years. 

Hitachi Content Platform for unstructured data operations: HCP now delivers a greater than 2x improvement in performance for cloud gen apps through new optimization, the company said. Hitachi Content Software for File adds front-end support for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) protocol. 

Hitachi Ops Center delivers enhanced AIOps: The new Hitachi Ops Center streamlines operations for distributed teams by applying AI and ML methodologies to reporting, performance optimization, and intelligent data management for the cloud-based health monitoring system.