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Hitachi Vantara storage takes turn to NVMe, cloud
Hitachi Vantara updates its products and prepares to lay out a strategy for using its storage for IoT and distributed data management amid the multi-cloud movement.
SAN DIEGO -- Hitachi Vantara today refreshed its hyper-converged infrastructure and converged infrastructure platforms, adding nonvolatile memory express, or NVMe, and cloud support.
Hitachi Vantara also updated its object storage and AI-driven distributed data management technology on the opening day of the Hitachi Next user conference.
The new Hitachi Vantara storage includes all-flash models of the Hitachi Unified Compute HC hyper-converged system and the integration of Hitachi Advanced Server Series server racks in Hitachi UCP converged infrastructure products.
A new Amazon S3 API to Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) object storage supports compliance and retention requirements for data stored in the public cloud. Also new in HCP is the addition of a file system gateway that syncs data from remote offices to the core data center.
Hitachi Vantara was launched in 2017 as a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Hitachi Ltd. Formerly known as Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Vantara is made up of Hitachi enterprise storage, Hitachi Insight IoT technologies and the Hitachi Pentaho big data analytics suite.
As Hitachi Data Systems, the vendor mostly competed head-to-head with Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM in the high-end enterprise storage market. As Hitachi Vantara, the vendor changed its strategy to emphasize cloud-based data services instead of storage hardware.
"The walls of the data center are coming down. We're building on the core foundation of Hitachi Vantara storage and data center infrastructure by accelerating our use of analytics and machine learning," said John Magee, Hitachi Vantara's vice president of portfolio marketing.
New Hitachi UCP models work with Advanced Server Series racks
Across-the-board upgrades to the UCP hardware include the launch of Hitachi UCP HC V124N, which scales to 72 TB of raw storage. The 1U appliance caches data in four 3D XPoint-based Intel Optane SSDs and taps eight NVMe-attached SSDs on the back end. Use cases include fraud detection, stock trading, transaction processing and similar IOPS-intensive workflows.
Magee said a Hitachi Vantara storage fabric for NVMe flash is actively under consideration, although he gave no timetable. He said customers are asking about the capability as they start to adapt NVMe to replace traditional SAS SSDs.
"We definitely are talking to customers about our roadmap on that," Magee said.
Hitachi's UCP CI converged infrastructure integrates with Hitachi's new Advanced Server DS7000 to support scale-up workloads. The new options also enable a customer to obtain Hitachi UCP CI as preconfigured racks for Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse applications or SAP HANA.
Advanced Server DS225 racks support Nvidia Tesla GPUs and can be used in conjunction with Hitachi UCP RS rack-scale systems to power specialized graphics applications.
Updates to Hitachi UCP Advisor orchestration include greater automation, particularly rules-based deployment and validation, Magee said.
Hitachi Vantara storage, multi-cloud data services
The Hitachi Content Platform object storage platform uses metadata tagging and discovery to help companies maintain regulatory compliance. Support for industry-standard Amazon S3 adds automated data tiering between sites and cybersecurity updates.
HCP is available as an appliance or in a software-only model. Hitachi also added support for VMware vSAN hyper-converged software.
The Hitachi Anywhere file sync-and-share platform has been around since 2013. A new Hitachi Anywhere Edge gateway appliance archives cold files and metadata. HCP Anywhere Edge file services natively support the Microsoft Windows SMB protocol.
Hitachi also said it is working to finalize the acquisition of Rean Cloud, a deal it announced in June. Rean Cloud is a cloud systems integrator, based in Herndon, Va., with technology designed to speed secure deployment in multi-cloud settings.
