Hitachi Vantara Enhances HCI Portfolio for Post-Pandemic World

Hitachi Vantara on Wednesday unveiled updates to its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio. The move is part of the company’s strategy to help customers in a post-pandemic business world and beyond.

In particular, the vendor updated the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) HC Series and Hitachi UCP RS Series.

To speed up provisioning, Hitachi Vantara announced the next generation of the Hitachi UCP Advisor. Additionally, the company announced certified support for SAP HANA workloads. There are also new Intel Cascade Lake Xenon Refresh processors and enhanced life cycle management capabilities.

Hitachi Vantara’s Bobby Soni

“There is no doubt that COVID-19 will leave everlasting impacts on how people around the world do business and live their day-to-day lives. For IT, this means supporting larger mobile and remote workforces with federated collaboration, an elevated focus on infrastructure resiliency and cybersecurity, and accelerated digital transformation initiatives,” said Bobby Soni, president, digital infrastructure business unit at Hitachi Vantara. “Hitachi Vantara is rapidly evolving our strategy to support CIOs and their teams, and our hyperconverged infrastructure solutions help them simplify digital infrastructure management as they grapple with today’s new realities.”

Evolving Business Priorities

The company’s latest product enhancements come in response to evolving business IT priorities; for example, cloud agility, capital preservation, improved productivity and remote work. Additionally, Hitachi Vantara’s digital infrastructure evolution, over the past several years, from an enterprise storage vendor to a digital infrastructure company that focuses on cloud, flexible consumption, software-defined and edge, better positions it to address new business realities.

Here’s what the vendor introduced today.

Hitachi Vantara’s Patricia Harris

“We’re going to be able to run more workloads off the same infrastructure,” said Patricia Harris, vice president and head of global marketing, digital infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, in reference to enhanced workload mobility and platform flexibility. “That improves resource utilization and drives up ROI; so, purpose built HCI for latency-critical applications that must perform at top speed and deliver a high level of performance.”

Latest from Intel

The Hitachi Integrated Infrastructure portfolio includes Unified Compute Platform CI, Unified Compute Platform HC, Adaptive Solution for Converged Infrastructure and Unified Compute Platform RS. Today, the Unified Compute Platform HC and Unified Compute Platform RS got an upgrade.

Both the Unified Compute Platform HC and Unified Compute Platform RS now include the latest Intel Cascade Lake Xenon Refresh processors. Additionally, there are enhanced life cycle management capabilities with the Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Advisor.

The Unified Compute Platform HC is the vendor’s scale-out hyperconverged appliances built on top of VMware vSAN. The Unified Compute Platform RS is a fully integrated Cloud Foundation platform that leverages VMware Cloud Foundation.

The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform provides a modern HCI solution that integrates with existing infrastructure, provides workload mobility and a common management interface. The vendor set out to right some limitations of traditional HCI. Those limitations include more silos and vendor lock-in, inflexible expansion and acquisition challenges.

Partner Opportunity

What today’s news means to channel partners?

“It’s important for our partners because it allows us to deliver streamlined solutions that they can go in and drive additional value for their customers — value that they can’t get with other solutions on the market,” said Colin Gallagher, vice president, infrastructure solutions product marketing at Hitachi Vantara. “Partners can solve new problems that their customers have been struggling with and drive better utilization in trying times. And customers get to leverage their investments in VMware, as they deliver a better VMware Cloud Foundation experience.