Hitachi Vantara Broadens, Enhances UCP

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Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., on Wednesday introduced some new offers as well as enhancements to its converged, hyperconverged systems portfolio, and UCP rack-scale system. Also new are expanded, integrated applications that target the modern data center.

The broad range of hardware and software enhancements aim to boost the company’s value proposition.

Hitachi Vantara’s Chris Gugger

“From a converged and hyperconverged portfolio perspective, the important thing is that we have a family of solutions,” Chris Gugger, director, infrastructure product marketing, Hitachi Vantara, told us. “We’re not trying to fit a single solution to solve every challenge that our customers have in the data center. We’re allowing them a highly selectable, scalable, converged, hyperconverged and rack-scale systems portfolio to configure them to their specific needs.”

Hitachi UCP systems leverage modular building blocks of infrastructure that are pretested and validated to meet specific needs. This allows customers to grow their systems with incremental cost/capacity, the company said.

What’s new?

On the infrastructure side, Hitachi introduced: NVMe caching support for UCP HC; the first general purpose GPU servers (UCP HC); support for new VSP storage models (UCP CI, UCP Advisor); more server options (UCP CI, HC, RS and Advisor); enhanced automation with policy-based provisioning for UCP Advisor; and converged orchestration management of advanced storage replication for UCP Advisor.

“Hitachi’s UCP Advisor is the software stack, or the glue that ties all of the systems together,” said Gugger.

On the software side, Hitachi announcements fall into three buckets: Hitachi solutions for the SAP HANA platform; Hitachi solutions for databases; and optimized infrastructure for big-data analytics.

More specifically the announcements are: SAP HANA Appliance and tailored data center integration (TDI) certifications; resource forecasting analytics and threshold alerts for SAP HANA Cockpit; tiering for SAP data with Pentaho data integration; Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) optimization; and reference architectures with Cloudera and MongoDB as a foundation for big-data analytics.

Hitachi Vantara’s Paula Phipps

Regarding SAP, Paula Phipps, director, solutions marketing, Hitachi Vantara, pointed out that SAP is requiring customers to move to HANA.

“That’s exciting and it’s a good thing, but it puts that compelling event in front of enterprises,” she said. “If you’re going to take advantage of that real-time data that HANA gives, SAP has drawn a line in the sand for 2025,” she said.

Phipps noted that it takes time to switch over to applications such as ERP, CRM and supply chain, and everything that goes with that such as financial systems and customer support systems.

“We’re keeping our customers ready to migrate; we’re working with them to migrate over and are taking them through the necessary steps,” she said.

What does Hitachi’s announcements mean to partners? Quite a lot, Gugger says.

“The fact that we have a family of products allows our partners to go after more business and tailor a solution to what a specific customer needs or wants,” he said.

Launched less than a year ago, Hitachi Vantara unifies the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho into a single integrated business. About half of Hitachi Vantara’s business goes through the channel.