Hitachi Vantara injects Skylaking servers with Optane caching, GPU grunt

Builds out server rackery, hyperconverged and converged systems lines

Hitachi Vantara has updated more servers with Skylake processors and added variants with Optane SSD caching and Nvidia GPU support.

It makes base Unified Compute Platform (UCP) servers, DS(nnn) models, and then optimises them for VMware environments with V(nnn) models. These V(nnn) models are then used in hyperconverged (HC) and rackscale (RS) product families:

Tase are all single node systems in 1 or 2U enclosures. The "F" suffix means an all-flash server; the others are hybrid flash/disk designs. The "G" suffix means an Nvidia GPU-accelerated system. DS220 and DS240 servers are used in a converged infrastructure (CI) product set:

Family	Product	CPU	Form Factor	Raw Storage
HC	V120	Platinum 860 24-core or Gold 6140 18-core or Silver 4110 8-core	1U	2.4 - 18 TB
	V120F	Platinum 860 24-core or Gold 6140 18-core	1U	4 - 38 TB
	V123F	Gold 6140 18-core	1U	4 - 38 TB
	V220	Gold 6140 18-core or Silver 4110 8-core	2U	12 - 64 TB
	V225G	1- 2 Platinum 8168 24-core or Gold 6154 18-core. 1-4 Nvidia Tesla GPU (NM10, P40) support.	2U	3.8 - 23.04 TB
RS	V120	1-2 Xeon 8160 Platinum 24-core or Gold 6140 18-core	1U	2 - 38 TB
	V120F	1-2 Xeon 8160 Platinum 24-core or Gold 6140 18-core or Silver 4110 8-core	1U	2.4-18TB
CI	DS220	1-2 Xeon SP	2U	To 12 x 3.5-inch SAS/SATA/NVMe drive bays & 2 x 2.5-inch SAS/SATA
	DS240	1-4 Xeon SP	2U	to 16 x 2.5-inch SAS/SATA/NVMe drive bays

The V123F (DS120 base) has an 375GB Optane 3D XPoint P4800X cache drive.

This is Hitachi V's second wave of Skylake servers. It announced its first Skylake RS and HC servers in August last year, with four V(nnn) models:

• V120F all-flash – 1U 1-node
• V210 hybrid – 2U 1-node
• V210F all-flash – 2U 1-node
• V240F all-flash – 2U 4-node

The V120F product name is used in the latest announcement.

The HC systems use vSan and the RS system support VMware Cloud Foundation. Hitachi's CI systems include the latest VSP storage, UCP Advisor and see the DS220 and DS240 servers.

Previously Hitachi V had a CB600 blade server line, with eight blades in a 6U chassis. There are no Skylake blade servers, or cartridge servers in this latest announcement.

Existing UCP Advisor management and orchestration software supports these new servers.

They feature in a Hitachi config for SAP HANA and a data lake with a MongoDB Cluster running on the RS servers. There are reference architectures for Cloudera and MongoDB with pre-tested, pre-validate infrastructure for Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub and MongoDB Enterprise. There is Pentaho Data [analytics] integration as well.

These new UCP server, systems and applications offerings are available globally now or expected to be available in August.

Hitachi Vantara is having a hard time keeping up with other server suppliers according to IDC, and is growing its sales less than the market as a whole. With these new models, particularly the ones with Optane caching and Nvidia GPUs, it will be looking to claw back some lost ground. ®