Hitachi Vantara Announces New AI Operations Software and Flash Storage Systems

Hitachi Vantara has announced several new innovations designed to promote data center modernization, including an updated advanced AI operations software portfolio: Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor, Hitachi Automation Director, and Hitachi Data Instance Director. Moreover, the new all-flash hybrid Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems and AI operations software give customers agility and automation, which Hitachi indicates helps to reduce costs and increase operational efficiencies. Developers will also be able to run more workloads in a single system via Docker and Redhat Openshift container integration with Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration.

Hitachi Vantara has announced several new innovations designed to promote data center modernization, including an updated advanced AI operations software portfolio: Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor, Hitachi Automation Director, and Hitachi Data Instance Director. Moreover, the new all-flash hybrid Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems and AI operations software give customers agility and automation, which Hitachi indicates helps to reduce costs and increase operational efficiencies. Developers will also be able to run more workloads in a single system via Docker and Redhat Openshift container integration with Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration.

Described as an “AI-powered brain,” Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor (HIAA) provides deeper data center insights by looking at data paths such as virtual machines, servers, networks, and storage.

New features include:

• Predictive analytics: AI mines telemetry data to predict when new storage purchases will be required, improving budget planning and helping to prevent performance dips. Machine learning analyzes all resources associated with storage to help ensure the right resource is purchased.
• 4x faster root-cause analysis: A patented AI engine analyzes telemetry data and configuration changes across the data path to isolate issues and uses a new heuristic engine to recommend a resolution. Integration with Hitachi Automation Director allows immediate fixes based on best practices.

Hitachi Automation Director (HAD) software delivers and manages IT resources (Hitachi calls it an “engine” of sorts) so that organizations can have their teams focus on innovation. The highly customizable HAD automates core IT service delivery routines as well to reduce errors that impact uptime, customer experiences and return on investment. This includes virtual machine, network zoning and storage and data protection tasks.

Enhancements include:

• Integrate with IT service management (ITSM) tools, including the ServiceNow platform, for improved tracking and control of IT resource delivery.
• Improve REST API integration for provisioning of third-party resources, including storage.
• Take commands from HIAA for issue remediation and storage configuration data.
• Automate the setup of Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID) data protection to safeguard against data loss or downtime.

Also announced is a new all-flash VSP F series and hybrid-flash VSP G series systems, which Hitachi claims support an agile data infrastructure with a 100% data availability guarantee, up to three times more in IOPS performance, and over twice the scalability compared to its prior VSP models. Hitachi claims that this will translate into faster analytics processing and application performance and will allow Cloud and container integration to support more workloads to run on a single system.

Enterprise-class VSP models include the all-flash VSP F700 and VSP F900 and the hybrid flash VSP G700 and G900 systems, while the midrange models include the VSP F350, F370, G350 and G370 systems. Hitachi has also backed their all-new VSP systems with their new flat service model and are bundled with a Foundation software package.

Improvements to VSP models include:

• Performance scalability: Scaling to more than 2.4M IOPS and 41GB/s of bandwidth.
• More efficiency: Up to 70% more IOPS per core for increased price/performance.
• Greater consolidation: 8x more volumes and one million snapshots per system.
• Improved data efficiency: Up to 3.4x faster deduplication and 5x faster SVOS-based compression.

Availability

All offerings are now available.

Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor

Hitachi Automation Director

Hitachi Data Instance Director

VSP F series and VSP G series

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