Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has made another leap forward in its technology leadership for delivering software-defined infrastructures that enable customers to simplify IT and free data from traditional hardware and location constraints, making it more accessible for all existing and new analytics-driven workloads.

With the newest additions to the Hitachi VSP family – the G200, G400, G600 and the upcoming G800, unveiled in Lagos on Tuesday, Hitachi Data Systems as an IT vendor addresses customer workload requirements from entry to the mainframe with a single software stack.

Extending the reach of powerful software capabilities that are built into Hitachi SVOS allows the entire VSP family to offer native heterogeneous storage virtualisation and multi-site active-active storage – as well as fully compatible data migration, replication and management.

Customers now have the ability to choose systems based on the necessary capacity, performance and price required to meet their business goals, not because of functional difference.

According to Ben Jooste, regional sales manager, Sub Saharan Africa, “To effectively unlock the value of a software-defined infrastructure, technology must simplify operations through automation, drive insight through better access to information, and improve agility through abstraction that turns fixed assets into flexible resources”.

Customers looking at smaller systems will now get access to the same virtualisation technology that has existed in prior HDS high-end systems that have achieved the highest overall product and use-case specific scores within Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays1.

Best of Breed Converged Platforms for Any Workload: The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) portfolio has been expanded with new hyper-converged and converged infrastructure models that now cover customers’ needs to rapidly and more easily support core to edge IT workloads.

The latest additions to the UCP family include the hyper-converged Hitachi UCP 1000 for VMware EVO:RAIL, and the converged Hitachi UCP 2000, both use new rack servers and target small to medium or remote or branch office environments.

The Hitachi UCP 6000 converged model integrates the recently launched Hitachi CB 2500 blade servers, and delivers unmatched price-performance for mission critical workloads.

Creating the Active Data Lake for Big Data Analytics: The hyper-converged architecture of the new Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform (HSP) provides cost-effective compute performance and on-demand capacity.

Capable of ingesting massive amounts of mixed data types across a distributed, clustered architecture, the simple, automated management of HSP allows elastic data growth by using Hitachi file system technology with open source management and virtualisation software.

HSP is the ideal scale-out platform for Hadoop environments, allowing users to analyze data in place and eliminate the need to move large data sets to perform analytics functions for big data.

Automated, Application-Led Storage Provisioning and Data Protection: Hitachi Automation Director, a new application that works with the Hitachi Command Suite management infrastructure, provides configurable best-practice-based service templates for simple, application-specific provisioning of storage resources to databases, applications and VDI environments.

Built-in support for role-based access control means that, once established, these templates can be used by business users in a move to self-service provisioning.

As a lightweight complement to Hitachi Command Suite, Hitachi Infrastructure Director is a new storage configuration and management application that uses the new VSP systems’ APIs to provide simple, intuitive management, guided by a built-in recommendation engine, for environments in which simplicity is more important than the need for manual control of every detail.

Hitachi Infrastructure Director gives users the power to direct simplified management operations to rapidly deploy new storage systems and services for the new models in the VSP family.

“For us to truly unlock the value of software-defined storage, the chosen technology must simplify operations through automation, drive insight for more flexible and robust access to data and create agility through abstraction by making fixed resources flexible. Hitachi offers a portfolio to make our goal of a software-defined infrastructure a reality,” said Darius Harris, senior IT manager, Nedbank, South Africa. “In a big move toward this goal, Hitachi is extending its Storage Virtualisation Operating System (SVOS) to an expanded Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family, essentially bringing the power and potential of storage virtualisation within reach to organisations like ours.”

Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., builds information management and Social Innovation solutions that help businesses succeed and societies be safer, healthier and smarter. We focus on big data that offers real value – what we call the Internet of Things that matter.

Its IT infrastructure, analytics, content and cloud solutions and services drive strategic management and analysis of the world’s data.

Only Hitachi Data Systems integrates the best information technology and operational technology from across the Hitachi family of companies to deliver the exceptional insight that business and society need to transform and thrive.