Hitachi Vantara expands their midrange offerings for both all-flash and hybrid platforms and extends their flat service model from the all-flash series to their hybrid series as well.

Hitachi Vantara, formed by Hitachi last fall at their inaugural .NEXT event, brought together three Hitachi companies — Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho – into one company which would have a focus on becoming the market leader around the Internet of Things. Hitachi Vantara’s legacy storage business is the base of that initiative however. And today, that base is receiving a refresh. A new lineup of all-flash and hybrid Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform [VSP] systems – with four models in each – is being announced. Hitachi Vantara also announced the enhancement of multiple solutions in their AI operations software portfolio.

“We are releasing a set of new products in our core storage portfolio,” said Mark Adams, Director, Infrastructure Solutions Marketing at Hitachi Vantara. Four new models are going into each our all-flash and our hybrid VSP series. “We are also announcing software updates around automation and analytics. The analytics enhancements include new tools to do predictive analytics and improved resolution engines. The automation software features better integration of automation tools with data protection platforms, through an improved set of REST APIs and a new ServiceNow integration.”

The theme of all the announcements is a very focused one.

“Its all about data centre modernization, to create new opportunities based on insights from data,” Adams said.

Adams noted that Hitachi Vantara’s overall strategy is focused on delivering three components: an agile data infrastructure; helping modernize data protection capabilities; and greater intelligence through AI and machine learning. These new announcements relate to the first and third elements.

“The new VSP platforms feature an improved overall flash design, with 3x more IOPS and lower latency,” Adams said. “They scale further with 2.5x more capacity in a system than today, to consolidate more operations, and provide more support for containers.”

Resilience is a core element of Hitachi Vantara branding, and resilience has been expanded with these new models.

“We are extending data resilience to all models, not just the high-end ones,” Adams said,

The four enterprise Hitachi VSP models include the all-flash VSP F700 and VSP F900 and the hybrid flash VSP G700 and G900. Hitachi is expanding its midrange coverage with four midrange models, the all-flash VSP F350, and F370, and the hybrid G350 and G370 systems.

“The new midrange offerings take up as little as 2U of rackspace,” Adams said, “Midrange is also a moving target, with these models having capabilities that would have been defined as enterprise not long ago. The F370, for example, has over 1 million IOPS. Yet these models are priced for the midrange.”

The new models have the expected upgrades in feeds and speeds, scaling at the high end to more than 2.4 million IOPS and 41MB/s of bandwidth, and having up to 70 per cent  more IOPS per core. With assistance from an updating of the OS, they also boast up to 8x more volumes, up to 3.4x faster deduplication and up to 5x faster compression.

“With our G series hybrid line, we have also expanded our data availability guarantee, and are introducing our flat service model from the F series, as well as appliance-based pricing, which has a single ordering code for hardware and software together,” Adams indicated. “We will be doing a lot of marketing around the flat service.”

“Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor [HIAA] is a brain that provides better insight analytics, simplifies budget forecasting and shortens the time required for troubleshooting,” said Richard Jew, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Marketing at Hitachi Vantara. The enhancements include new machine learning analytics which use telemetry data to predict when new storage purchases will be required. It now also uses a new heuristic engine to provide 4x faster root cause analysis, to recommend resolution, and allow immediate fixed based on an integration with Hitachi Automation Director.

Hitachi Automation Director’s enhancements include new integration with IT service management  tools, including the ServiceNow platform, for improved tracking and control of IT resource delivery. REST API integration has also been improved. And a new integration with Hitachi Data Instance Director automates the setup of HDID data protection.

The new integrations between HIAA, HAD and HDID are available independently, or packaged together with Hitachi VSP. They, and the new VSP platforms, are all available now.