Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd, today announced exciting new technology to accelerate customer success with Business Defined IT – a closer linking of a company’s business and technology objectives that demands a more responsive IT foundation.

Dubbed “Continuous Cloud Infrastructure”, this foundation can drive IT efficiency through a responsive, software-rich architecture that can quickly react to changing needs without continual redesign and disruption.

With this goal in mind, Hitachi today delivers the Hitachi Storage Virtualisation Operating System (SVOS), Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000, a new version of the Hitachi Command Suite management platform and significant enhancements to its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform converged computing offerings. Together, these technologies provide the foundation of an IT infrastructure that can adapt to continuously changing business needs, without disruption.

“Our customers across industries have told us for them to keep up with the fast pace of business, they are aligning the IT and business functions more closely than ever,” said Wayne Dick, business development manager, Hitachi Data Systems for Sub-Saharan Africa. “IT teams are looking to new infrastructure strategies to deploy more continuous, adaptable and scalable infrastructure. Businesses need solutions that don’t require constant and disruptive changes to the technology they support. And that is what we are delivering today.”

Deep Ecosystem Integration and Solution Readiness

Hitachi Data Systems’ new class-leading technologies come to market with integration across virtualisation platforms, databases and a variety of clustering and operating systems platforms, and can be quickly adopted to support a variety of workloads.

In particular, deep work with strategic partners such as Microsoft, SAP and VMware ensures that SVOS and the VSP G1000 are certified in key initiatives like Microsoft Private Cloud deployments, SAP HANA’s Tailored Data Center Initiative and extended integration within VMware ecosystems.

Hitachi Storage Virtualisation Operating System: Software-Defined Without Compromise

Hitachi Storage Virtualisation Operating System (SVOS) is the first stand-alone software implementation of best-in-class Hitachi storage virtualisation. This new storage operating system provides a common software architecture that will double the useful life of hardware architectures, span the breadth of the HDS infrastructure portfolio and enhance and amplify the benefits of server virtualization. SVOS customers have greater choice, flexibility and a simplified infrastructure for a future-ready path to the software defined data center without the complicated layers required by competitive offerings.

As an evolution of the successful Hitachi enterprise storage operating systems, SVOS delivers the flexibility of software-defined architectures with the proven capabilities of Hitachi enterprise storage software. Primary features include flash optimisation, advanced storage virtualisation, automated tiering, non-disruptive data migration and a new native global active device feature that will provide multi-system and multi-datacenter active-active capabilities without the need for an appliance – an industry first.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1000: The Best Gets Better

The best software is best experienced on the best hardware, so Hitachi is also introducing the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1000, the first available system on which customers can natively deploy SVOS. This combination of market-leading software and the most reliable hardware on the planet provides customers a rock-solid foundation for mission critical applications in the enterprise.

Continuing Hitachi’s leadership in high-performance, trusted infrastructure, the system can start small and scale block-storage throughput performance of well over 3M IOPS, over 48GB/sec of usable bandwidth and NFS ops/sec performance of over 1.2M in unified configurations.

The highly adaptable VSP G1000 helps companies deploy a single platform for all data, by growing to seamlessly accommodate a wide variety of customer needs, including:

• A virtualisation controller without internal capacity.
• Unified storage system with up to 8-node Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) clusters.
• The highly available infrastructure for Hitachi Content Platform environments.

This flexibility, along with planned data-in-place upgrades mean customers can plan for a significantly longer useful life of this technology because of its ready adaptation to changing business needs, without the pain and expense of constant technology replacements.

Significant Software and Solution Enhancements Simplify Customer Environments

• Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) and Unified Compute Platform Director 3.5: On top of support for VSP G1000 and SVOS, there are new entry-level configurations of UCP for VMware vSphere and increased capabilities in UCP Director, such as server profiling for simplified provisioning and enhanced disaster recovery integration.

• Hitachi Command Suite (HCS): The latest version of the award-winning Hitachi integrated management platform supports the new global storage virtualisation features in SVOS, and offers a common REST API across the platform, as well as an updated, streamlined user interface.