Customers Gain the Most Available, Automated and Agile IT Environment Required for Today's Dynamic Business Needs
SANTA CLARA, Calif.— April 23, 2014 — Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced exciting new technology to accelerate customer success with Business-Defined IT – a closer linking of a company's business and technology objectives that demands a more responsive IT foundation. Called a "Continuous Cloud Infrastructure", this foundation can drive IT efficiency through a responsive, software-rich architecture that can quickly react to changing needs without continual redesign and disruption. A move toward Continuous Cloud Infrastructure ensures customers can build the most available, automated and agile environment for next-generation data centers.
With this goal in mind, Hitachi today delivers Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS), Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 (VSP G1000), a new version of the Hitachi Command Suite management platform and significant enhancements to its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform converged computing offerings. Together, these technologies provide the foundation of an IT infrastructure that can adapt to continuously changing business needs, without disruption.
"Our customers across industries have told us that to keep up with the frenetic pace of business they are aligning the IT and business functions more closely than ever," said Brian Householder, COO, Hitachi Data Systems. "In order to execute in this business defined world, IT teams are looking to new infrastructure strategies to deploy more continuous, adaptable and scalable infrastructure. Businesses need solutions that don't require constant and disruptive changes to the technology they support. And that is what we are delivering today."
Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System: Software-Defined Without Compromise
Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System is the first stand-alone software implementation of best-in-class Hitachi storage virtualization. This new storage operating system provides a common software architecture that will double the useful life of hardware architectures, span the breadth of the HDS infrastructure portfolio and enhance and amplify the benefits of server virtualization. SVOS customers have greater choice, flexibility and a simplified infrastructure for a future-ready path to the software-defined data center without the complicated layers required by competitive offerings.
As an evolution of the successful Hitachi enterprise storage operating systems, SVOS delivers the flexibility of software-defined architectures with the proven capabilities of Hitachi enterprise storage software. Primary features include flash optimization, advanced storage virtualization, automated tiering, nondisruptive data migration and a new native global active device feature that will provide multi-system and multi-datacenter active-active capabilities without the need for an appliance – an industry first.
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000: The Best Gets Better
The best software is best experienced on the best hardware, so Hitachi is also introducing the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1000, the first available system on which customers can natively deploy SVOS. This combination of market-leading software and the most reliable hardware on the planet provides customers a rock-solid foundation for mission critical applications in the enterprise.
Continuing Hitachi leadership in high-performance, trusted infrastructure, the system can start small and scale block-storage throughput performance of well over 3M IOPS, over 48GB/sec of usable bandwidth, and NFS ops/sec performance of over 1.2M in unified configurations.
The highly adaptable VSP G1000 helps companies deploy a single platform for all data, by growing to seamlessly accommodate a wide variety of customer needs, including:
- A virtualization controller without internal capacity.
- Unified storage system with up to 8-node Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) clusters.
- The highly available infrastructure for Hitachi Content Platform environments.
This flexibility, along with planned data-in-place upgrades mean customers can plan for a significantly longer useful life of this technology because of its ready adaptation to changing business needs, without the pain and expense of constant technology replacements.
"Hitachi Data Systems participates in our journey to deliver safe, high quality care with better, less wasteful means," said Richard Carter, systems architect, Seattle Children's Hospital. "We think this new HDS platform will provide a lean, efficient technology solution that demonstrates unrivaled availability and reliability. The increased assurance through automation and reduced human error could allow us to focus on providing the safest, most effective care possible. The streamlined solution could drive lower costs that support our founding promise to care for every child in our region, regardless of their family's ability to pay."
Significant Software and Solution Enhancements Simplify Customer Environments
- Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) and Unified Compute Platform Director 3.5: On top of support for VSP G1000 and SVOS, there are new entry-level configurations of UCP for VMware vSphere and increased capabilities in Unified Compute Director, such as server profiling for simplified provisioning and enhanced disaster recovery integration.
- Hitachi Command Suite (HCS): The latest version of the award-winning Hitachi integrated management platform supports the new global storage virtualization features in SVOS, and offers a common REST API across the platform, as well as an updated, streamlined user interface.
Deep Ecosystem Integration and Solution Readiness
These new class-leading technologies come to market with integration across virtualization platforms, databases and a variety of clustering and operating systems platforms, and can be quickly adopted to support a variety of workloads.
In particular, collaboration with strategic partners such as Microsoft®, SAP and VMware enables SVOS and the VSP G1000 to be certified in key initiatives like Microsoft Private Cloud deployments, SAP HANA Tailored Data Center Integration and VMware Software-Defined Data Center technology.
Additional Supporting Quotes
"We are pleased to work with HDS to enable customers to realize the value of the software-defined enterprise," said Sanjay Katyal, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "HDS UCP with VMware vSphere(R) provides customers with a reliable and efficient enterprise converged infrastructure solution."
"This is the type of technological breakthrough we have been waiting for," said Howard Holton, director of IT, Precision Discovery. "This flexibility will potentially save us a considerable amount of money by only upgrading our hardware when needed for the foreseeable future. Additionally, these new capabilities create huge benefits for us and for our customers. We're able to cut processing time significantly, and return that time, and the related costs, back to our customers. Our customers are able to review data faster, meet their deadlines sooner, and strategize more effectively. We're enabling them to do things better, which in turn, boosts our competitive edge."
"As an IT company, we count on the reliability of our state-of-the-art infrastructure solution for our most critical workloads. Being an existing Hitachi Data Systems enterprise infrastructure solutions customer, we know that HDS technology perfectly addresses our needs of high data growth along with higher performance by delivering sub-millisecond response times," said Jitendra Sangharajka, associate vice President – information systems, Infosys Ltd. "Best of all, it protects our existing investments while seamlessly integrating with our storage architecture without any disruption. As we continue to grow, we are excited about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000 – the next gen platform – as it will simplify storage complexity associated with organizational expansion and provide us with the ability to scale while lowering overall TCO."
"As a public healthcare organisation, Osakidetza manages over 30 hospital facilities, covering over 5 million patients, and our storage needs stand at 2.5 petabytes. We rely on performance of our system and availability of our data to save people's lives on a daily basis," said Aritza Iratzagorria, chief production officer, Osakidetza. "Having been a Hitachi Data Systems customer for nearly a decade, we have absolute confidence that Hitachi's storage solutions provide us with the level of reliability and security we need to be a successful healthcare provider. The healthcare industry's storage requirements have been expanding exponentially over the past few years, with more and more data needing to be recorded in ever-detailed precision. This will only continue to grow. This new solution will certainly bring a competitive advantage to any organisations with rising storage needs – which in today's marketplace, covers pretty much any company in any industry, not just healthcare."
"As a growing company in the automotive industry, we require IT solutions that are flexible and have the incredible ability to scale alongside our business expansion. Hitachi Data Systems provides us with exactly this – solutions that can scale up, out and deep," said Christoph Buchstätter, manager data center services, Porsche Informatik. "This gives our storage needs the optimal infrastructure needed to grow in all dimensions, and with the management platform efficiently managing all data types for an agile data center, we can concentrate on expanding the business without worrying about our IT foundations."
"As a Credit Hire Organisation, the timely access to data is mission-critical and powers the core of our business," said Raymond Ford, Group CTO, Automotive and Insurance Solutions Group PLC. "Hitachi Data Systems' solution is unmatched in its ability to cater to this fundamental need – it places the right emphasis on low latency and high availability to satisfy the resilience that our demanding applications require. Its ability to automate data placement for higher performance and lower cost, along with the capabilities for non-disruptive migration and host-transparent technology refresh to be executed in days also provides us with a competitive advantage in the marketplace."
"The nature of our business means that we have very intensive and constantly growing data storage and management needs. As such, we were looking for the most intelligent and powerful enterprise storage system in the industry – and we found this in Hitachi Data Systems' storage solutions," said Antonio Cardone, corporate IT service manager, Acantho -Telecommunications company. "Utilizing Hitachi storage technology, we have consolidated our previously disparate storage resources into a single pool of powerful and scalable enterprise storage capacity. Hitachi storage technology helped us to deploy robust and powerful Disaster Recovery solutions for our customers, enabling better RPOs and RTOs."
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About Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems provides information technologies, services and solutions that help companies improve IT costs and agility, and innovate with information to make a difference in the world. Our customers gain compelling return on investment (ROI), unmatched return on assets (ROA), and demonstrable business impact. With over 6,300 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Our products, services and solutions are trusted by the world's leading enterprises, including more than 70% of the Fortune 100 and more than 80% of the Fortune Global 100. Visit us at http://www.hds.com.
About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 326,000 employees worldwide. The company's consolidated revenues for fiscal 2012 (ended March 31, 2013) totaled 9,041 billion yen ($96.1 billion). Hitachi is focusing more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes infrastructure systems, information & telecommunication systems, power systems, construction machinery, high functional material & components, automotive systems and others. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com
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Press Contacts:
Hitachi Data Systems
Chris Drago
408-410-4591
christopher.drago@hds.com
