Hitachi Vantara Advances IT Infrastructure Portfolio With Updated Converged and Hyperconverged Systems, Enhanced Applications Support

First All-NVMe Hyperconverged System and New Scale-Up Converged Infrastructure Server Options Boost Performance; Enhanced Automation and Application Solutions Speed Time to Market for Digital Businesses


SAN DIEGO, Sept. 26, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today at NEXT 2018 announced technology enhancements across its leading  IT infrastructure portfolio to help customers modernize their data centers as part of their digital transformation strategies. These enhancements include Hitachi’s first all-NVMe hyperconverged system delivering dramatically improved performance and efficiency for Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC (UCP HC) customers. Additional converged infrastructure server options, functionality and applications infrastructure solution updates expand the capabilities of Hitachi’s solution portfolio to address any workload, at scale, in today’s multi-cloud environments.

These enhancements help enterprises deliver business outcomes by maximizing the power of data no matter where it resides – from the data center to the cloud and out to the edge – and move them forward in today’s digital, data-driven business landscape.

“As more enterprises embark on data center modernization initiatives, they’re looking to leverage hyperconverged infrastructures for greater flexibility, increased agility and simpler deployment and management,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Hitachi Vantara’s continued investment in its core infrastructure products and technologies, such as the new all-flash NVMe hyperconverged system, will play a significant role in ensuring organizations are realizing the full value of their hyperconverged platforms for driving digital transformation and ‘cloud-like’ IT.”

Enhanced Converged and Hyperconverged Portfolio
The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family of converged, hyperconverged and rack-scale systems provides customers with simplified platforms of pre-tested and validated compute, network and storage that are fast to deploy and easy to manage and expand based on changing business requirements. Enhancements to the UCP portfolio include:

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC (UCP HC) hyperconverged infrastructure appliance series will include a new all-flash NVMe UCP HC V124N system providing high storage density and capacity in a low-latency 1U form factor housing up to 12 NVMe SSDs (up to four ultra-fast Intel 3D XPoint-based Intel Optane SSDs for cache and eight NVMe SSDs for capacity), delivering a total raw capacity of up to 72 TB. It is designed to address the needs of customers requiring higher IOPS and ultra-low latency for applications such as real-time analytics, stock trading, fraud detection and online transaction processing (OLTP). The all-NVMe hyperconverged system will offer customers dramatically improved performance and efficiencies with a higher ROI by delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS at sub-millisecond response time, for a 3X increase in IOPS performance and 4X lower latency compared to the prior all-flash UCP HC system.

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor (UCP Advisor) IT management and orchestration software will include new deployment manager functionality that builds on the simplified, automated management and orchestration of UCP Advisor. With automated, rule-based deployment and validation software, the UCP Advisor deployment manager automates hundreds of manual tasks and can reduce deployment times from multiple days to as little as a few hours.

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI (UCP CI) systems include new support for Hitachi Advanced Server DS7000 series servers for the most demanding scale-up workloads, including SAP and Oracle environments, and the Hitachi Advanced Server DS225 with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs for specialized graphics needs including VDI, CAD, collaborative workplaces and advanced analytics. These new options provide a flexible, low-risk path to modernizing data center infrastructure for a broad set of enterprise applications. New mix-and-match server options increase server flexibility and density to address different environments, use cases and applications.

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS (UCP RS) is a rack-scale system designed to simplify the deployment of an agile data infrastructure at scale. UCP RS adds support for the Hitachi DS225 server with NVIDIA Tesla GPU for workloads requiring advanced graphics capabilities.

Expanded Applications Infrastructure Optimization for Databases

Hitachi Solution for Databases, powered by UCP systems, expands customer choice for both optimizing and scaling performance of the data infrastructure in critical Oracle environments.

Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) optimization is enhanced with the addition of Hadoop as an offload target. By allowing cold data from a production Oracle EDW to be offloaded to Hadoop, the data set is reduced, resulting in improved EDW performance and lower software licensing costs by minimizing the number of licenses needed for primary database data.

The ability to offload Oracle EDW data to MongoDB and now Hadoop, based on Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS (UCP RS) and Pentaho Data Integration, delivers an infrastructure solution that can blend data from a variety of disparate sources – whether the data is structured as in an Oracle Database, semi-structured as in MongoDB, or from unstructured sources such as social media and web content – to provide a more complete view, find correlations and accelerate time to insight.

In addition, Oracle customers deploying the most mission-critical, high-performance database and application environments can now use UCP CI configurations with Hitachi DS7000 series servers to provide the scalability and performance that modern digital businesses require.

Hitachi Solution for the SAP HANA Platform now gives customers greater choice and simplified management through newly certified SAP HANA appliances based on Hitachi UCP CI with Hitachi DS7000 series servers, and enhanced management integration via Hitachi storage and server adapters for the SAP HANA Cockpit.

UCP CI configurations with Hitachi DS7000 series are also planned to support a broad range of virtual infrastructure solutions, including Virtual HANA (vHANA) and other VMware-based workloads.

“Hitachi Vantara is committed to providing customers of our IT infrastructure products and solutions with the latest technology innovations to address their evolving business and data requirements with new levels of efficiency, agility and management simplicity,” said Bob Madaio, vice president of Infrastructure Solutions Marketing at Hitachi Vantara. “With these latest advancements across our leading converged and hyperconverged systems portfolio, we continue to provide customers with an unmatched choice of optimized systems and validated solutions to maximize ROI and unlock data-driven insights for better business outcomes.”

Availability
UCP CI configurations with Hitachi DS7000 series servers are available now for supported SAP HANA and Oracle environments. The optional all-NVMe chassis for UCP HC systems are expected to be generally available in November 2018, and will be complemented by all-NVMe Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) options for standalone deployment or within UCP CI in 2019. The Hitachi DS225 with Nvidia GPU support and new mix-and-match server options for UCP CI and RS will be generally available in November. The latest release of UCP Advisor with new deployment manager functionality will be generally available in October 2018.

Additional Resources

Blog post: “Hitachi + VMware vSAN + Intel Optane NVMe = Turbocharged Hyperconverged Infrastructure,” by Dinesh Singh

About Hitachi NEXT 2018
NEXT 2018 is the premier event for the digital revolution. It’s for data-driven innovators who lead the transformation in their industry. They lead with clear insights drawn from their own data to make the right decisions for the best results. Data changes the way the world works, advancing business and even society itself. There can never be too much data and it can never come too quickly if organizations manage, govern, mobilize and analyze it effectively. At NEXT 2018, leaders see what’s next for their data in IT, operational technology and the internet of things, from Hitachi and our many partners. They bring back insights and strategies they can use right away to transform their businesses and build them for tomorrow. At NEXT 2018 we change the way the world works. NEXT 2018 is held September 25-27 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront in San Diego, California. For more information and to register, please visit HitachiNEXT.com.

About Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society. We combine technology, intellectual property and industry knowledge to deliver data-managing solutions that help enterprises improve their customers’ experiences, develop new revenue streams, and lower the costs of business. Only Hitachi Vantara elevates your innovation advantage by combining deep information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and domain expertise. We work with organizations everywhere to drive data to meaningful outcomes. Visit us at www.HitachiVantara.com.

Connect With Hitachi Vantara

About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, delivers innovations that answer society’s challenges, combining its operational technology, information technology, and products/systems. The company’s consolidated revenues for fiscal 2017 (ended March 31, 2018) totaled 9,368.6 billion yen ($88.4 billion). The Hitachi Group is an innovation partner for the IoT era, and it has approximately 307,000 employees worldwide. Through collaborative creation with customers, Hitachi is deploying Social Innovation Business using digital technologies in a broad range of sectors, including Power/Energy, Industry/Distribution/Water, Urban Development, and Finance/Social Infrastructure/Healthcare. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.  

HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names are properties of their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACTS
Brian Garabedian
Hitachi Vantara
Brian.garabedian@hitachivantara.com
+1 408.386.4621

Ashley Paula
Weber Shandwick for Hitachi Vantara
apaula@webershandwick.com
+1 415.262.5975