By Cat Yong
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) recently announced a line-up of enhanced offerings, that they dubbed “the most exciting portfolio expansion in HDS history.” Notably, one of these is new additions to the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family, thanks to a new and improved operating system, the Storage Virtualisation Operating System (SVOS).
Hitachi’s APAC Business Director of Infrastructure Solutions, Saravanan Krishnan also described the new offerings, as bringing enterprise-level capabilities at last to the mid-market segment, as well as a lot of software capabilities.
“Hardware is being commoditised (so it stands to reason) we deliver software-defined solutions for faster innovation and improved business outcomes that give businesses competitive advantage,” he said.
Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform (UCP) is also expanded with new converged and hyperconverged models, namely the Hitachi UCP1000 for VMware’s EVO:Rail, and Hitachi UCP2000.
The Hitachi UCP6000 is the highest-end model that utilises the latest CB 2500 blade servers and caters to mission-critical workloads.
This new UCP portfolio offers a choice of platforms to address any workload with automation and self-service capabilities that accelerate infrastructure deployment and enables operational efficiency.
According to Saravanan, the SVOS that is usually found on Hitachi’s VSP family, is now also available on any commodity hardware. This means enterprise capabilities like flash performance acceleration, data-at-rest encryption, workload-based space optimisation and global active device and non-disruptive data migration, is now available for the mid-market.
New Hyper Scale out platform
Hitachi’s completely new scale-out hyperconverged platform, the Hyper Scale-Out Platform (HSP), is a completely new solution for Hadoop environments, and uses Hitachi’s file system technology with open source management and virtualisation software.
Saravanan shared that there is strong interest from markets in US and Asia Pacific, with beta programs already running in China and Australia.
The solution ties back to very specific use cases, namely big data and analytics applications, and Hitachi’s recent Pentaho acquisition, significantly adds to their big data and analytics portfolio with data integration, business intelligence (BI) dashboard and reporting tools capabilities.
New software
Hitachi is also bringing to market, new software to automate the provisioning and protection of application environments.
All of Hitachi’s announcements for each of their portfolios – unified, converged, hyperconverged, scale out and content & mobility – significantly expands their software-defined portfolio.
Extending the Hitachi SVOS capabilities to smaller systems, is also significant.
Saravanan said, “We are walking the talk and ensuring that virtualisation cuts across all business sizes.
“The next step now is to open up the management framework for API integration – decouple hardware and software even further, and in conjunction with ecosystem players.”
National duty
HDS Malaysia’s Managing Director, Wee Kai Teck observed that Malaysia’s readiness for smart nation solutions, isn’t there yet.
HDS’ own social innovation solutions are gearing up towards enabling a smart nation, and Wee shared that he fully intends to increase awareness in Malaysia, in the next six to 12 months.
