Driving Insights Across a New, Vital Data Infrastructure

Dan McConnell
SVP, Product Management, Digital Infrastructure

October 10, 2023

The early days of the U.S. automobile had dramatic and lasting effects on the complexion of the country. In particular, the fervor brought on by the exciting new form of mobility sped investment in the development of a grand system of interconnected roads and bridges that today spans more than 4.19 million miles.

Early image of the New York Thruway. (Getty Images)

But this vital infrastructure, which generates more than $650 billion in annual economic activity is also perpetually hindered by disrepair and mismanagement, both of which have taken their tolls on commerce and the environment. In 2022, the average annual commuter costs and time lost due to traffic congestion grew to $190 billion.

A strikingly similar dilemma is plaguing today’s digital enterprises. Across industries more companies are challenged to maintain and manage increasingly compute and data intensive applications and tools across aging infrastructure and complex hybrid cloud environments. Amid the complexity, data silos have flourished, stalling collaboration and innovation and impinging data credibility and analysis, along the way.

It’s clear that the vital infrastructure of our digital world is in need of a new data platform; one that provides much greater availability, accessibility, and clarity to drive exciting new business insights.

It’s All About the Data

Hitachi Vantara has been at the forefront of the data industry for years. Through our data storage systems, data management and analytics software solutions, we have been steadfast in building solutions that help customers get the absolute most out of their data. We are so confident in our technology that we offer a 100% Data Availability Guarantee, a guarantee that is still as viable and trusted today as it was when we introduced it 22 years ago.

And we’re not letting up. This week we raised the ante on data accessibility & availability by announcing plans to transform our data storage portfolio into a single hybrid cloud data platform called Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One.

This announcement signals a major strategic direction for our company. Imagine a single data plane that spreads neatly across your organization’s structured and unstructured data, from traditional hardware optimized arrays to scalable software defined, to cloud hosted. With Virtual Storage Platform One the intention is to enable organizations to develop, run, and manage their applications anywhere, from on-premises, to cloud, to edge. But more than enabling superior data management and accessibility, this solution is designed to help organizations do more with their data.

Virtual Storage Platform One will also be infused with Hitachi Vantara machine learning models that enable administrators to not only query and pull insights from the infrastructure but to automate and augment processes, such as determining the best deployment architecture for an application’s data.

With this new approach, targeted to roll out in the first quarter of 2024, we are creating a single, highly intelligent data fabric that’s powered by AI and supports all data types across all environments. No longer will there be a need to spend time and resources attempting to cobble together disparate environments, patch silos, and procure infrastructure from within a vacuum. Virtual Storage Platform One will support software defined storage, mainframe, cloud, all from the single platform.

We’re very excited about this direction and the potential it will unlock for our customers by freeing their environments of data congestion and confinement to drive data insights. So, stay tuned. It’s going to be a thrilling ride.

Dan McConnell

As head of product management for infrastructure, Dan's passionate about analyzing trends and emerging technologies to meet the needs of global customers. Prior to Hitachi Vantara, he spent 20 years at Dell where he was part of the team responsible for their merger with EMC.