Also announced, at Hitachi’s AdVantage 2020 event, was the HNAS, a more powerful upgrade of their NAS gateway solution, and new channel tools and incents to help sell the new offerings.
Ian Sinclair, CTO at Hitachi Canada
On Tuesday, at their virtual AdVantage 2020 event, Hitachi Vantara made a trio of solution announcements designed to strengthen the company’s offerings in the lower part of the market in which they play, the midmarket segment which is primarily covered by their channel partners. They announced an expansion of their NVMe all-flash VSP E-Series, introduced earlier this year, with two new models covering the lower part of its market segment. They introduced Hitachi Virtual Storage-as-a-Service, a reseller-friendly cloud storage offering sold on a consumption model. They also unveiled the HNAS 5000, an upgrade of their NAS solution that acts as a gateway for both Hitachi and competitor storage arrays.
The commonality between all three announcements is that they extend technology from Hitachi Vantara’s large enterprise products, notably the VSP [Virtual Storage Platform] 5000, down to the midmarket, the lower part of the market that the company addresses.
“The portfolio we are introducing here is highly relevant around cost and efficiency issues to these three unique buckets being addressed, said Ian Sinclair, CTO at Hitachi Canada. “Midmarket customers have told us before that they felt priced out from our top-tier enterprise features. These enhancements combine price with enterprise capabilities from our VSP 5000 in a way that is attractive for a midmarket offering. That kind of feature parity is not found among our competitor offerings.”
Sinclair, whose own background before joining Hitachi Vantara in April 2019 included senior operational jobs at companies like Canadian Tire where he looked on these issues from a customer perspective, said that addressing these issues is particularly important in Canada.
“Canada is a midmarket segment country, and compounded by the pandemic filter, this makes the changes to the portfolio we are introducing highly relevant here as companies adapt and grow in 2021,” he noted.
In April, Hitachi Vantara introduced the VSP E990, the first model in the new E-series, which offered an NVMe, all-flash platform specifically for the midmarket, and also featured some high-end capabilities from the enterprise VSP 5000 they introduced at their fall 2019.NEXT event. Now, they have expanded the E-Series with two models covering the lower part of the midmarket, the E590 and the E790.
“Think of the E990 as a truck, which is optimized for capacity, and can go across the midmarket range,” Sinclair said. “The E590 is a sedan, optimized for cost, which provides an entry into the market with enterprise capability. The E790 is more of a performance enhanced sportscar compared to the E590.” Sinclair said his understanding is that these two new models will complete the E-Series, with customers wanting more power than the E990 having the VSP 5000 as their option.
Both the E590 and E790 are 2U models, which have the same SVOS RF operating system as the VSP 5000. They work with the Hitachi Ops Center enterprise management software, and have their own intelligent embedded management capability that enables rapid installation, automated provisioning and intelligent performance management, which includes AI-powered Advanced Data Reduction.
While the new E-series models are aimed at the channel side of Hitachi’s business, Hitachi Virtual Storage-as-a-Service, which was also announced, is purely partner-delivered. It is delivered by channel partners as a managed service, and is available either on-prem or through a colo. It is not – at this point in time – available in the public cloud.
Hitachi has offered consumption-based pricing before through their EverFlex financing, but the difference here is that Hitachi Virtual Storage-as-a-Service is purely a channel offering.
“Virtual Storage as-a-Service is pivoting to be channel partner led, and is focused on enabling partners to be able to effectively position the expanded portfolio more accurately to each customer within the midmarket,” Sinclair indicated. “It gives them a lot more flexibility.”
He indicated that customer response had been very positive.
“The resounding feedback is this is the way they want to pay going forward. There will be additional complementary models with even more flexibility to customers.”
The third part of the announcement is the HNAS 5000, a NAS gateway designed to front end Hitachi VSP systems – or competitor arrays. It has double the throughput of the HNAS 4000, which is now over four years old.
“The important feature in this is the gateway capability,” Sinclair said. “Because everything inside of this is virtualized, it’s not just a filer. It can front end our storage platforms for high IOPS, or can also virtualize our competitors’ arrays to leverage investments that customers already have.”
Along with the new product, the company also introduced new partner enablement resources and tools to help sell it. These include Hitachi Guru, a midrange storage workflow recommendation tool, and a new dynamic pricing tool that accelerates deals with deal pricing guidance and automate deal approval workflows. Training, sandbox and online labs are available for support, as is easy-to-launch marketing campaign assets in the Partner Marketing Hub, which are both templated and customizable. Finally, Hitachi is saying that the new products will be supported with rich, stackable incentives.
