Hitachi Brings Flexible Virtualisation Solutions

Sunil Chavan, Senior Director Solution Sales, Asia Pacific at Hitachi Data Systems, Asia-Pacific

Exploring the field of storage to resolve complex IT business challenges, Sunil Chavan, Senior Director Solution Sales, Asia Pacific at Hitachi Data Systems, Asia-Pacific shared some of his insights with Dataquest, about the Indian market and how to deal with the current customer challenges. Excerpts

How has Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series improved Hitachi’s storage portfolio?

The most recent addition to Hitachi Data Systems’ Virtual Storage Platform is the G series portfolio. It has been designed to reduce costs of traditional environments, exploit and monetize data, which is too often trapped in silos of technology. The NAS embedded functionality, cloud optimization and enhanced VMware integration for our storage platforms is to simplify and accelerate datacentre modernization efforts.

Hitachi’s modules are built to help reduce capital expenditures by providing a single, SAN and NAS Storage Platform for all workloads in a compact form. The module even minimizes the operating costs, as VSP G series systems require less power, minimum cooling and limited space in the datacentre.

Our customers continue to reassess their IT strategies by finding ways to optimize and reduce ongoing costs of traditional storage and cloud services. However, they need flexible solutions that can address disparate environments such as virtualization, remote and core datacentres and dynamic cloud strategies in order to meet infrastructure requirements. Hitachi’s module allows customers to leverage existing infrastructure investments regardless of environment.

What is the significance of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series for the Indian market?

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G Series Portfolio is designed to reduce ongoing costs, provide flexible solutions that addresses disparate environments including virtualization, remote and core datacentres and dynamic cloud strategies; to meet infrastructure requirements for a variety of applications. The modules also assists in reducing capital expenditures, as it provides a single, SAN and NAS Storage platform for all workloads.

Hitachi’s VSP G series allows customers the ability to choose systems based on the necessary capacity, performance and price required to meet business goals. The module offers native heterogeneous storage virtualization and multi-site active storage, along with fully-compatible data migration, replication and management. These proven capabilities provide a leap forward in consolidating and simplifying user-environments of all sizes. It also allows simpler migrations, easier management and full resilience without any complications of appliances.

How will Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G series provide solutions to address current customer challenges?

The access to data is critical for businesses, since data is increasingly used in a variety of systems, devices, applications and locations. Since the uptake of Internet of Things (IoT), which generates a much greater amount of data, amongst the businesses it integrates traditional data sources (IT) and operational data sources (OT) for analytics. Together, they will be able to outreach their competitors in the market.

Our customers who are looking for smaller systems can now get access to the same virtualization technology. Though the technology exist in the Hitachi’s high-end systems, but now has achieved the highest overall product and user-case specific scores within Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for General-Purpose, High-End Storage Arrays.

Hitachi Data Systems is helping the enterprises locally and globally to align their IT with business requirements, using IT economics to drive greater value for the business. We are positioned to deliver business transformational solutions which are rooted to the core competencies, with a balance of world-class infrastructure and flexible and secure content solutions.

Please enlighten us about Hitachi and VMware’s vision about Software-defined storage?

Hitachi shares long-term relationship with VMware, as our vision is to continue to empower our mutual customers. We aim to simplify their IT operations and accelerate adoption of unified hybrid cloud. Hitachi’s unified storage solutions combined with VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will enable enterprises to reduce storage complexity and cost. This will also increase efficiency on their journey to a modernized, software-defined datacentre. The key solution provided by VMware’s vSphere Virtual Volumes was developed with a vision to drive Software-defined Storage, for both Hitachi and VMware.

Hitachi Data Systems provides true software defined infrastructure capability for customers with its storage virtualization operating system as it helps abstract data irrespective of the underlying hardware. This means that data which is the most critical asset of an organization is truly independent of the underlying infrastructure and thus can be securely governed, mobilized and analysed.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series allows the customers to maximise resources, reduce storage complexity and also increase efficiency by enabling application-specific storage service levels to be applied to each Virtual Machine (VM). Hitachi’s unified storage solutions combined with support for VMware VSphere Virtual Volumes will enable enterprises to reduce storage complexity and cost, while increasing efficiency on their journey to a modernized, software-defined datacentre.