Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has expanded its range of software-defined storage so customers can pick and choose their preferred capacity.
Announced at HDS Connect 2015 in Las Vegas, Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) models now include the G200, G400, G600 and an upcoming G800 in addition to its G1000 product, offering users storage virtualisation and data migration functionality no matter what capacity they require.
"Customers now have the ability to choose systems based on the necessary capacity, performance and price required to meet their business goals, not because of functional difference," HDS said.
Running on all the VSP models is Hitachi's Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS), which helps customers consolidate and simplify user environments and perform easier migrations.
Converged platform
HDS has also grown its Unified Compute Platform (UCP) portfolio, adding a hyper-converged product in UCP 1000, which supports VMware's Evo:Rail appliance, a combined compute, networking, and storage solution competing with Oracle's more expensive converged systems.
Like the 1000, the newly-announced UCP 2000 uses new rack servers and is aimed at SMB office users, according to HDS.
The company's UCP 6000 features Hitachi CB 2500 blade servers, and the expanded range was welcomed by retailer Spar.
"The Hitachi UCP technologies will help us stay ahead in the markets, fine tune what we need to supply to best meet customer needs, and support a most efficient business model," said Andreas Kranabitl, managing director for SPAR's information and communication services.
"We at SPAR are now wisely prepared to meet and proactively address any changes and growth."
Data lake
Yesterday, upcoming HDS acquisition Pentaho spoke about its ability to make data lakes "easy and safe to swim" in - a timely announcement with HDS now revealing a new Hyper Scale-Out Platform (HSP).
Capable of swallowing massive amounts of different types of data across a distributed, clustered architecture, the firm claims Hitachi file system technology enables this data lake to grow elastically with the help of virtualisation.
HSP is being positioned as an ideal Hadoop platform, allowing users to analyse data there and then rather than moving it out of Hadoop in order to do so.
IT-as-a-service management
Lastly, HDS has bolstered its IT management suite to help out beleaguered IT departments.
It reckons these solutions will lead to greater automation, cutting costs and complexity along the way.
Its Automation Director works with Hitachi Command Suite to let customers create service templates for simple, application-specific provisioning of storage resources to databases, applications and VDI environments.
Once created, end users can also try these templates out in a self-service capacity.
Meanwhile, Infrastructure Director is a management app that hooks into the VSP systems' APIs to automatically control environments that don't need too much manual tweaking.
Instance Director is designed to simplify data protection by automating backup snapshots and data cloning, in addition to live backup and archiving under one platform.
"The fundamentals of IT are changing," Sean Moser, senior VP of HDS product management, said. "Customers are looking for ways to be more agile and flexible to gain a competitive advantage.
"Hitachi is delivering a new generation of software-defined technologies built to support the changing needs of customer application environments to deliver on those goals and connect what works today with what's next."
