Dan McConnell
SVP, Product Management, Digital Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara
October 12, 2021
Storage has been on a decades-long march toward ever-greater complexity. Yes, individual systems have gotten much easier to use, but the sheer number of types of systems have created a higher level of complexity. The complexity of managing and reconfiguring multiple types of arrays and the difficulty of migrating data too often acted as a brake, retarding adaptation to new business conditions.
Today, Hitachi Vantara takes bold steps to flip that script. We have reimagined storage as enabling technology, an accelerating force that anticipates your changing business requirements rather than forever having to catch up. The result is agile storage that, by design, allows you to pursue goals with the confidence that the storage technology is ready for future opportunities.
We at Hitachi Vantara see storage as an enabler of your digital transformation goals and cloud-adoption mandates, no matter the size or industry. Our entire storage portfolio is designed for speed. Unlike in the past when speed was just about numbers, speed today gives you the inherent agility necessary to adapt to ever-changing requirements immediately.
The decisions Hitachi has taken with its storage architectures allow for the design of arrays that are highly optimized to deliver different capabilities and support divergent needs. While we offer various storage architectures, the entire portfolio shares a common operating system that speaks to the requirements of every storage scenario.
This is a first for the world of storage. It is similar to what is happening in transportation, where we see the emergence of electric cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles, all making use of a common battery design. We’ve designed each solution to meet the needs of a particular requirement, but all are driven by a common operating system for increased efficiency.
The latest Hitachi storage portfolio features multiple products with a shared strategy and approach. In the following sections, I will provide a brief introduction to our new storage tiers and highlight what makes them each unique … and the same.
See the News: Announcing Next-Gen Infrastructure for Enterprise and Midrange Storage
For years, enterprise storage has been seen as your business’s crown jewel. These top-of-the-line storage arrays were expected to deliver the highest performance, massive scale and unshakeable reliability. But enterprise storage could be complex and immutable.
There is much to be admired about enterprise storage, and many characteristics are worth carrying forward. For example, we must continue to offer various price and performance tiers. The hottest data must be served up in huge volumes in an instant. But other classes of data should be stored in the same array, trading some performance for price.
Hitachi’s new enterprise storage architecture enables data consumption with better efficiency, enhanced data reduction, and improved system performance for several tiers, based on different technologies. And it does it all without sacrificing the trust, which has long made ours the enterprise storage of choice.
We’ve embraced new storage options such as hyper-low latency NVMe over fabric options while enabling them to function side by side with legacy storage that can continue to deliver tremendous value for years. Now it is easy to use the fastest NVMe storage to support VMware and transactional online transaction processing (OLTP), SAS-based flash drives to support slower workloads, such as SAP, and even virtualized storage, for low-cost, high-capacity or public-cloud connectivity.
How you acquire technology has changed. So have we. Hitachi’s new enterprise storage will offer cloud-like flexible consumption and pay-as-you-use options to match.
Proper nondisruptive, data-in-place upgrades using multicontroller storage arrays deliver peace of mind that enterprise storage will be effortlessly upgradeable far into the future, without massive rip and replace hardware upgrades. Instead of the brutal planning and complex replacement cycles, today’s storage architecture normalizes evolution and embraces change. And rather than add complexity, analytics, machine learning and automation, it makes storage management easier and more predictable, enabling you to do more with less.
Read the Blog: Drive Toward the Future With the New Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series
The lines differentiating enterprise and midrange storage have blurred in a data-driven world. We all need performance, reliability and availability to grow and succeed. The only meaningful difference is scale.
That’s why Hitachi’s midrange storage architecture starts with our enterprise operating system to deliver levels of performance and availability as its starting point. It is not a different product. It is simply world-class Hitachi reliability shaped to be more affordable and accessible.
As you and your team become more focused on driving business growth, we have put ease of use at the forefront of our midrange solutions. Increasing simplicity through automation and artificial intelligence not only enhances reliability but also enables you to support changing needs without specialist qualifications.
While our world is changing quickly, your budgets may not. Our new midrange solutions extend support for reliable hard drive technologies that make it possible to expand on-premises storage at prices that approach public cloud offerings with the added assurance of 100% data availability guaranteed, unmatched by any cloud service. Even better, the latest deduplication and compression technologies apply equally to old and new media, bringing legacy drive technology forward to meet today’s requirements.
Read the Blog: Break Barriers, Not the Bank, With New Hitachi VSP E Series Midrange Storage
It is one thing to say that data is driving your decision-making. It is quite another to store vast quantities of unstructured data in a way that makes it accessible and usable. Object storage was previously deep, dark and cold.
Hitachi’s object storage brings that data to life to drive applications that can help grow your business. We’re making it possible to provide object storage for any application, whether an independent software vendor (ISV) product, in-house developments or cloud services, to channel the right data to where it can do the greatest good.
This is no one-size-fits-all object storage solution. Object storage adapts to many different business needs. Performance is optimized for specific use cases, whether you need to support cloud-native applications, ingest for high-performance AI or machine learning (ML) use, or scale data services for specialized workloads. Smart load balancing ensures that unexpected outages or activity surges are elegantly handled.
Read the Blog: High-Performance Reliable Object Storage for Today’s Most Demanding Applications
The cloud has reshaped our relationship with technology. We all expect to acquire, pay for and interact with services whenever and wherever we need them. The developer whipping up an app on Monday afternoon to address a new business opportunity can’t wait a month for IT to provide storage resources. They’ll just sneak off to the public cloud.
Combining new automation technology with Hitachi’s legendary resiliency makes cloud-like simplicity possible within any business environment. Service-level templates provision storage resources as needed directly by the end user, without you ever seeing the request. Our new arrays use automation and analytics to allocate the right resources and guarantee the appropriate service level agreements (SLAs). This makes it possible for you to empower your users while also protecting data compliance requirements and keeping data online all the time. AI and ML provide real-time monitoring throughout to anticipate and resolve issues and increase performance without increasing your workload.
The bottom line is, today’s world is different, and storage must evolve along with it. Change is now the default state as digital transformation realigns your business around data. Infrastructure is no longer a place: It’s a hybrid of on-premises and cloud-based services that must act as one to support a workforce that is migrating out of the office to … everywhere. How you store data will be one of the determining factors of success in this new world. Hitachi Vantara is excited to provide the innovation needed for your future.
Read about our vision for the future of hybrid cloud data storage: The Road Ahead: Digital Infrastructure for the Data-Driven.
Dan McConnell is Senior Vice President of Product Management and Enablement at Hitachi Vantara.
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.
