Welcome to the Software-Defined Storage Revolution

In the wake of the pandemic, the urgency for truly distributed platforms has peaked. Distributed applications that, just two years ago, were side projects for many environments have been pressed into production. In many cases, you have faced an unpleasant choice: Choose a siloed solution, knowing full-well that you are missing the mark on delivering the flexibility your business needs. Or build your own open-source system, cobbling together a distributed environment from a couple of old servers running ancient versions of Kubernetes, SUSE, or Red Hat that someone found in the back of a closet.

The problem in both cases is that these distributed platforms effectively run outside your core IT solutions. Both options layer on complexity without supporting a seamless data plane from your data center to the cloud. As a result, distributed applications are becoming their own silos with no ability to move data among themselves, the storage environment, or the cloud. And what about the high standards of service level agreements and support which you expect from critical systems? It’s best not to ask.

In short, just as you are trying to simplify your architectures, you are being forced to layer on more complexity. That is why Hitachi has developed its new virtual storage software solutions. We’ve taken the best of what we have learned from our battle-tested Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform architecture to deliver Hitachi Virtual Storage Software Block, an enterprise-class, software-defined distributed storage solution.

Hitachi’s new platform delivers the agility and scale to serve your cloud-native applications faster. Virtual Storage Software Block retains the performance and flexible growth benefits of block storage while simultaneously unlocking the potential of distributed solutions. Is it magic? Nope. Even better, it is the result of patented Hitachi Polyphase Erasure Coding technology that delivers substantially improved data-read performance and provides significant capacity savings over garden-variety, software-defined storage erasure coding.

Hitachi now delivers a complete, enterprise-class distributed storage solution powered by Hitachi Polyphase Erasure Coding. The solution extends your data plane between the Virtual Storage Platform and Virtual Storage Software Block allowing you to move workloads between them and manage these two environments together. In short, no more silos. Virtual Storage Software Block is more than just a software-defined storage solution. It is an integrated distributed architecture for your modern applications.

The introduction of Virtual Storage Software Block means one platform can handle all the distributed storage requirements of your developers. Whether your Oracle database needs an entire storage array or a Cassandra database needs multiple data stores, Hitachi Virtual Storage Software Block lets you decide how to handle those workloads all from within one platform.

Now you can have a single, end-to-end storage architecture that affords the flexibility to reconfigure your storage to address new requirements. Scale up storage capacity and performance simply by adding commodity servers. Virtual Storage Software Block extends your data plane across multiple physical storage resources, creating agile, virtualized platforms that your applications can consume as needed.

These days a lot of development is taking place in the cloud, but regulations like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and considerations such as cost mean that keeping your data on premises is becoming more desirable. Virtual Storage Software Block provides the flexibility to address any scenario. Develop in the cloud or on premises, then host in either location as requirements dictate.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Software is what software-defined storage is meant to be: simple, flexible, scalable distributed storage that moves with your business needs.

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Ian Clatworthy is Product Marketing and Management Principal at Hitachi Vantara.