Hitachi Vantara Unifies Cloud Management With Updated Hyperconverged Infrastructure Portfolio

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure and solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today introduced new enhancements and capabilities to its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio with updates to Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) HC and Hitachi UCP RS. The latest updates provide added benefits to customers including faster provisioning with new Hitachi UCP Advisor, certified support for SAP HANA workloads, new Intel Cascade Lake Xenon Refresh processors that increase performance, and enhanced lifecycle management capabilities that deliver non-disruptive upgrades.

"There is no doubt that COVID-19 will leave everlasting impacts on how people around the world do business and live their day-to-day lives. For IT, this means supporting larger mobile and remote workforces with federated collaboration, an elevated focus on infrastructure resiliency and cybersecurity, and accelerated digital transformation initiatives," said Bobby Soni, president, Digital Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara. "Hitachi Vantara is rapidly evolving our strategy to support CIOs and their teams, and our hyperconverged infrastructure solutions help them simplify digital infrastructure management as they grapple with today's new realities."

Hitachi's updated HCI solutions unify cloud infrastructure management with seamless interoperability across customers' environments of traditional storage, HCI-powered hybrid clouds and public clouds. The latest offerings include a scalable and simplified foundation for hybrid cloud, allowing customers to rapidly scale out data center architecture designs when increased data center resources are required.

Through enhanced automation and intelligence, customers can accelerate innovation, improve productivity and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) across a variety of use cases including hybrid cloud, business-critical apps such as SAP HANA, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and DevOps. Hitachi Vantara's HCI portfolio is updated with enhanced day 0-2 management capabilities including upgraded lifecycle management that enables non-disruptive upgrades for the full HCI stack, including IP and SAN network switches. These latest updates deliver key benefits to customers including:

• Unified cloud management: Customers have the flexibility to build a cloud infrastructure with seamless workload and data mobility across on-premises and public cloud environments. Hitachi UCP Advisor accelerates provisioning up to 80% faster compared to previous HCI management tools and reduces management complexity across the environment.
  
  
• Scalable performance: Greater performance, scale and density supports IT departments' ability to rapidly scale data center resources for business-critical applications and lower operational overhead for better TCO. The updated HCI platforms provide certified support for SAP HANA workloads on HCI. Intel Cascade Lake Refresh Xeon processors increase performance for workload consolidation while avoiding resource contention issues. Hitachi HCI solutions help reduce CapEx and OpEx overhead with advanced automation and data efficiency technologies.
  
  
• Simplified consumption: EverFlex from Hitachi Vantara provides simple, elastic and comprehensive acquisition choices for the entire Hitachi Vantara portfolio, including the UCP Family, with consumption-based pricing models that align IT spend with business use and help lower costs by up to 20%¹ with pay-as-you-go pricing. Customers can also accelerate time to production with pre-validated and optimized bundles and starter packs, including solutions enabling remote work.
  
  
• Streamlined Partner Sales Motion: Hitachi Vantara's HCI solution is market proven with 100% YoY growth. With Hitachi Vantara's innovative bundles and pre-validated reference architectures, partners can easily sell, speed up quoting and fulfill orders faster to deliver revenue and profit maximization while enabling error-free deployments. Additionally, Hitachi Vantara offers customizable services for cross-selling and up-selling with other proven Hitachi IT portfolio products.

Supporting Quotes

"We chose Hitachi UCP HC after evaluation against other hyperconverged vendor solutions," said Vo Nguyen, IT manager, Seven System Vietnam JSC. "UCP HC's all-in-one, single-vendor solution, with VMware vSAN integration, made it easy to meet our performance and availability needs. To be able to economically grow and scale as we expand our business closed the deal."

"Hyperconverged infrastructure has quickly become an important option for many data centers, virtualizing and collapsing storage, networking and compute to simplify management," said Enrico Signoretti, analyst, Gigaom Research. "Hitachi Vantara's new HCI solutions hit the nail on the head by providing the right management tools and integrations to minimize initial deployment and improve day-2 operations."

"Our longstanding relationship with Hitachi Vantara has helped customers modernize their data centers, from delivering more secure, scalable and compliant digital workspace infrastructure to dense, high-performance hyperconverged infrastructure supporting business-critical apps such as SAP HANA," said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. "Hitachi Vantara's updated hyperconverged solutions can provide reliable lifecycle management, policy-based automation, and a consistent experience across the software-defined data center."

"Customers increasingly want the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure, but they don't want another silo to manage or to worry about the complexity of moving data between multiple tiers of compute," said Dan McConnell, senior vice president, product management, Enterprise Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara. "For example, when customers are ready to move data from dev/test into production, they want a seamless way to do it. Hitachi Vantara's enhanced HCI portfolio uniquely provides fully integrated solutions that allow customers to move data between different tiers of infrastructure easily and to scale the amount of storage needed, reducing complexity while improving productivity."

¹ Based on Hitachi Vantara internal testing and/or industry-standard benchmarks against published claims of competitive products

Availability

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC and Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS are available now from Hitachi Vantara and its global network of business partners.

Additional Resources

• Blog post: "Why IT Will Never Be the Same Again," by Bobby Soni, president, Digital Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara
• Blog post: "The Challenge of Increasing Cloud Agility While Maintaining Your Existing Systems," by Colin Gallagher, vice president, product marketing, Digital Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara
• Infographic: Automate to Innovate ? Hitachi HCI Appliance
• Solution Profile: Remote Workspace with Security and Compliance

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About Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi Vantara, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., guides our customers from what's now to what's next by solving their digital challenges. Working alongside each customer, we apply our unmatched industrial and digital capabilities to their data and applications to benefit both business and society. More than 80% of the Fortune 100 trust Hitachi Vantara to help them develop new revenue streams, unlock competitive advantages, lower costs, enhance customer experiences, and deliver social and environmental value. Visit us at www.hitachivantara.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is focused on its Social Innovation Business that combines information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and products. The company's consolidated revenues for fiscal year 2019 (ended March 31, 2020) totaled 8,767.2 billion yen ($80.4 billion), and it employed approximately 301,000 people worldwide. Hitachi drives digital innovation across five sectors - Mobility, Smart Life, Industry, Energy and IT - through Lumada, Hitachi's advanced digital solutions, services, and technologies for turning data into insights to drive digital innovation. Its purpose is to deliver solutions that increase social, environmental and economic value for its customers. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at https://www.hitachi.com.

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SOURCE Hitachi Vantara Corporation