This article is more than 1 year old

HDS conference product splurge sees it lining up for data harvest

Huge Hitachi conglomerate eyes cross-selling opportunities

With a cornucopia of announcements, HDS is extending its VSP high-end technology down range, as well as introducing new UCP models, a Hyper Scale-Out Platform and infrastructure management software tools.

This full house of news was announced during the HDS Connect conference at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, with an ITaaS meme: IT as a Service, across virtualised, hyper-converged and scale-out platforms. These storage products are also – of course, how could we forget – software-defined.

We have:

  • New Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) models: G200, G400, G600 and G800 with SVOS SW running across the range
  • Expanded Unified Compute Platform (UCP) products with a core-to-edge range
    • UCP 1000 hyper-converged appliance for EVO: RAIL
    • UCP 2000 converged system for small-to-medium or remote or branch office environments
    • UCP 6000 converged model for mission-crit workloads
  • HSP Hyper Scale-Out Platform for swimming in data lakes
  • Infrastructure management software tools
    • Hitachi Automation Director with configurable best-practice-based service templates
    • Hitachi Infrastructure Director storage configuration and management application
    • Hitachi Instance Director for automation and orchestration of Hitachi storage-based snapshot, clone and replication technologies

The extended VSP range has been described earlier today. It relates to the existing HUS arrays, that fit under the VSP currently, by signalling their replacement, because HDS is saying it "is the only IT vendor to address customer workload requirements from entry to the mainframe with a single software stack".

We understand that the HUS range will persist for around a year and then be effectively replaced by these VSP Gx00 systems.

HDS asserts that the extended VSP range can consolidate and simplify "user environments of all sizes and allow simpler migrations, easier management and full resiliency without the complication of appliances".

Nevertheless it is also announcing more appliances, with new UCP models converging Hitachi servers and HDS storage.

Both the UCP 1000 and 2000 use new rack servers, while the UCP6000 integrates Hitachi's CB 2500 blade servers, HDS claims it "delivers unmatched price-performance". The UCP products are managed with Unified Compute Platform Director infrastructure automation software.

HSP and data lakes

The HSP is a scale-out platform for Hadoop environments. It has a distributed clustered architecture and uses Hitachi file system technology with open source management and virtualisation software. It can ingest "massive amounts of mixed data types," and HDS says it has simple automated management.

Users can "analyse data in place and [don't] need to move large data sets to perform analytics functions for big data".

It uses 2U nodes comprising x86 server and 12 x 4TB disk drives. There is a minimum configuration of 5 nodes and it's been tested with up to 100. The nodes run Linux and KVM, so the means for analytics can be run in place. The Hortonworks Hadoop distribution is used though we can imagine Cloudera and MapR distributions will also be supported at some stage.

We can also imagine that the Pentaho integration and predictive analytics software, once the acquisition is complete, could be bundled with it to round out the offering.

The overall Hitachi group has a massive industrial presence and its many and varied products will be used to have their sensors feed data to Hitachi data lakes – or data seas, as is more likely – and be analysed to make the machinery run more efficiently. It's a triple play:

  • Generate the data from sensors in Hitachi machinery and equipment
  • Transmit and store it on HDS storage gear
  • Analyse it with HDS analytics

The cross-selling opportunities here for Hitachi and HDS are immense and something that is denied to other, pure-IT-play suppliers. They have to weld partnerships and eco-systems together to match data generating sources with data lake stores and analytics.

The UCP products show the ability of Hitachi subsidiaries to work together and that augurs well for wider co-operation between business units in the conglomerate. It could emerge as a whale in the world's data seas, a data krill gulper, instead of your average big IT fish. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like