Hitachi Vantara's 4.0 update of its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio fuses the latest Intel chips, faster performance speeds, and consumption-based pricing with the VMware's HCI software stack and cloud management software. 

Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform (UCP) server portfolio includes UCP HC – the vendor's hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliance – as well as its rack scale infrastructure converged brother, Hitachi UCP RS.

For the 4.0 updates, the vendor updated its UCP Advisor capabilities to simplify IT management orchestration, which the vendor claims accelerates deployments up to 80% faster compared to earlier versions of its HCI management tools.

The Hitachi platforms now feature Intel's Cascade Lake Xenon Refresh processor. 

And the vendor also introduced a new consumption and deployment service called EverFlex, which gives customers consumption-based pricing across the entire Hitachi Vantara portfolio, including the UCP Family.

As with earlier versions, Hitachi Vantara HCI systems provides plug-ins to VMware’s vRealize Suite. This helps IT developers build applications in any cloud with secure and consistent operations. Customers can then manage and automate all infrastructure components without leaving the hypervisor ecosystem and provision the right resources to match the needs of the application portfolio from vCenter with an end-to-end view of the whole process.

Remote Workers, Distributed Environments

The global pandemic is forcing businesses to surf the wave of change. As if that isn’t already hard enough, it has to be done under constrained budgets, while magically improving productivity and delivering secure and compliant services to remote workers across distributed environments. 

During a media roundtable, Patricia Harris, VP, marketing, digital infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara said this is why HCI systems are emerging as the “preferred deployment model” because they enable linear scale out. In money talk, this translates to a smaller investment upfront as customers can start with a single appliance and grow as needed in increments of both capacity and performance, Harris explained.

Traditional HCI Challenges

While it does hold promise, Harris said the traditional HCI approach presents three problems. First, a traditional HCI cluster can potentially create yet another data and system silo in the organization without interoperability. “Many HCI solutions do not actually integrate with existing internal fans or converged infrastructures” resulting in a loss of productivity and efficiency, she said. In the same capacity, without interoperability customers are also at risk of being exposed to vendor and platform lock-in.

Second, not all workloads are created equal, and that diversity requires flexibility to scale compute and storage independently from one another. Sometimes, Harris said, in traditional HCI platforms “those things get locked in together.” The third challenge, according to Harris, is forecasting the appropriate storage and compute needs so as to avoid tying up capital in resources that will end up being underutilized. 

Hitachi Vantara HCI

Hitachi’s UCP integrates with existing infrastructure to “break down those silos and enable workload mobility” under a common management interface for both the HCI platform and any other existing storage across on-premises and public cloud environments, Harris said. This, she added, translates to customers maximizing IT investments. 

On the same token, the 4.0 update holds a higher capacity to run more workloads off the same infrastructure, thus further improving resource utilization and IT investments. SAP certified support for mission critical HANA workloads is included in the update, which Harris noted will be particularly useful for customers that are modernizing their SAP environment onto Hitachi HCI service.

HCI’s ‘Best Kept Secret’

Most companies are rethinking their priorities, and vendors are realigning their strategies to meet customer demands. While Hitachi Vantara has historically been a leader in the enterprise storage markets, it has quietly been making moves in the hyperconverged shadows for the past five years. “We're a little bit of a best kept secret,” said Bobby Soni, president of digital infrastructure.

Like many of the other hardware vendors in the HCI space, Hitachi Vantara’s strategy is built in alignment with VMware, which leads the HCI software market.

“We've really built out a full set of lifecycle management capabilities because that's what customers tell us they want,” said Colin Gallagher, Hitachi Vantara’s VP of infrastructure solutions, product marketing. “They don't want to have to manage all the intricate elements and have to worry about firmware on HPAs or drive controls.” Ultimately, he said, that’s why enterprises are turning to HCI  – for the “turnkey appliance experience.”

Different HCI Flavor

The market, according to Gallagher, is made up of hardware vendors taking VMware software and throwing together in the same box. Dell EMC’s VxRail and VxRack, he said, are the only appliances that can compete with the company’s UCP HC and RS.

“If anyone else besides Dell EMC says they deliver a vSAN appliance, they’re stretching the truth,” he said. Adding that unlike any of the other vSAN ready nodes in the market, Hitachi Vantara has built its own management orchestration capabilities on top of VMware software packaging. “We're actually delivering our own intellectual property that provides the full lifecycle management experience.”