Hitachi Vantara updates converged and hyperconverged systems, enhances applications support

Hitachi Vantara has announced technology enhancements across its leading IT infrastructure portfolio at its partner use conference NEXT 2018 to help customers modernise 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 multicloud environments.

These enhancements help enterprises deliver business outcomes by maximising 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.

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Mike Leone says, "As more enterprises embark on data center modernisation initiatives, they're looking to leverage hyperconverged infrastructures for greater flexibility, increased agility and simpler deployment and management.

"Hitachi Vantara's investment in its core infrastructure products and technologies, such as the new all-flash NVMe hyperconverged system, will play a role in ensuring organisations are realising the full value of their hyperconverged platforms for driving digital transformation and 'cloud-like' IT.

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 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 specialised graphics needs including VDI, CAD, collaborative workplaces and advanced analytics.

These new options provide a flexible, low-risk path to modernising 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.

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

Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) optimisation 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 minimising 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 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 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," Hitachi Vantara infrastructure solutions marketing vice president Bob Madaio says.