Hitachi Vantara: VSP One leads revamped storage portfolio
On this storage provider profile, we take a look at Hitachi Vantara, which is a small a part of a really huge organisation.
Since we final checked out Hitachi Vantara, its storage portfolio has undergone one thing of a revamp, primarily based round its VSP One household that gives block, file and object storage – with efficiency profiles that vary from NVMe flash to HDD capability – accessible throughout on-premise, cloud and even mainframe environments.
It might present all this by way of as-a-service fashions of procurement, and in addition affords full-stack IT together with compute and – by way of partnerships – networking, too – and with containerisation for cloud-native deployments.
Hitachi Vantara is the storage, information and analytics division of the enormous Hitachi group, which as a company is ranked 196th within the Forbes World 500 as of final 12 months. In current occasions, Hitachi has declined on this rating. It was at thirty eighth in 2012, 78th in 2014 and 106th in 2020.
Shaped out of the Hitachi Knowledge Programs storage group, Vantara was created in 2017 upon a merger with the group’s Pentaho enterprise intelligence operation and the Hitachi Perception Group (IT companies and consulting).
Hitachi Vantara is a small a part of the mother or father Hitachi company, whose consolidated revenues for fiscal 12 months 2020 had been $70.72bn, with subsidiaries numbered within the a whole lot and roughly just below 270,000 workers worldwide in 2024.
Vantara was fashioned in 2017 to ship digital methods. Its identify was chosen for being “suggestive”, in accordance with CEO Brian Householder in 2017, and is supposed to evoke “benefit”, a “vantage level” and “virtualisation”.
How does Hitachi Vantara rank towards different storage gamers?
In Hitachi’s outcomes for 2023, Digital Programs & Providers revenues had been 2,599 billion yen ($18.4bn) and an increase of 4% year-on-year.
Nonetheless, Vantara storage seems to be a comparatively small a part of Digital Programs & Providers.
IDC reckoned the corporate’s exterior storage system revenues at $1.55bn and a market share of 4.9%. That was a small enhance on 2022, by which it had storage array income and share of $1.42bn and 4.4%.
That places Hitachi Vantara seventh within the IDC rating of storage array gamers, degree with IBM, however solely “others” beneath them.
What are Hitachi Vantara’s key storage merchandise?
Hitachi Vantara’s flagship storage platform is Digital Storage Platform (VSP) One. VSP One – launched in late 2024 – affords a single information material throughout on-premise and cloud with all-QLC and object storage merchandise added at the moment.
High of the road in block storage is the VSP 5000 collection, which comes because the all-flash 5200 and 5600, with an H-suffix variant to every that signifies the opportunity of spinning disk HDD capability.
Per node, every provide 65,280 LUNs at 256TB per LUN and most 1,024 snapshots per LUN. All of them enable for Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Ficon mainframe connectivity.
The 5200 affords capability as much as slightly below 300PB. NVMe SCM (storage class reminiscence) might be fitted. The ratio of NVMe flash to SAS HDDs doable is about 1:8, with the latter going as much as drive sizes of 18TB.
The 5600 mannequin good points a a lot increased drive and port rely. Throughput can also be very a lot improved over the 5200 (312GBps vs 52GBps).
VSP block storage arrays run a standard working system, Storage Virtualization OS (SVOS).
The VSP One Block vary is aimed on the midrange, and is available in a 2U type issue with choices for TLC and QLC flash storage capability. It might scale per equipment from 32TB efficient to 1.8PB and to 65 nodes. It additionally runs SVOS – that may handle different suppliers’ arrays – and may run file and S3 object, too.
Vantara’s E collection are the E590 and E790 – it appears to have misplaced the E1090 since we final surveyed the corporate. These additionally scale to PBs however lack the mainframe entry of the 5000s. In addition they retain spinning disk HDD capability.
VSP One SDS is a software-defined platform geared toward “distributed block purposes” that doubtlessly run to PB scale. It runs on third-party {hardware} and within the Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) cloud. A key concept is that prospects have a substantial amount of flexibility in how they deploy it. SVOS permits for information move throughout purposes and areas, with Kubernetes APIs to permit containerised purposes.
Hitachi Vantara’s file storage provide comes within the type of VSP One File collection, by which fashions are given quantity suffixes, specifically 32, 34 and 38.
VSP One File 32 is geared toward entry-level and cost-sensitive deployments, whereas the 34 goals at prospects that need all-flash – presumably the 32 makes use of HDDs – and the 38 is constructed for all-out efficiency. Every mannequin can also be distinguished by connectivity choices – extra Ethernet bandwidth, Fibre Channel decisions and uncooked bandwidth – and node rely (from 20 to 80). VSP One File arrays even have some S3 object storage functionality, however solely as a tier for connection to the cloud.
Object storage is served by VSP One Object, offering S3 native storage that may scale from a couple of TB to 150TB per node in a minimal eight-node cluster. It’s geared toward information lake and information warehouse, backup repository and AI/ML use instances.
Hitachi Content material Platform is the corporate’s unstructured information platform. It comes as a bodily or digital equipment or as storage software program, can scale to exabytes and is offered as hybrid (with HDDs and flash, for instance) and all-flash. Capability might be prolonged from on-premise to the three main clouds – AWS, Azure and GCP – or any S3-compatible cloud.
Hyper-converged infrastructure comes within the type of {hardware} home equipment in its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform, which might be all-flash, all-NVMe flash and GPU-equipped. UCP makes use of VMware vSphere as its hypervisor, with node capability that may go from a couple of TB to the low 100-plus TB vary with a most of 64 nodes.
What markets and workloads does Hitachi Vantara goal?
Hitachi Vantara storage can take care of workloads that vary from entry-level and SME storage to essentially the most demanding enterprise workloads that embrace transactional processing and AI.
In 2024, Hitachi launched its iQ portfolio that mixes Nvidia applied sciences with Hitachi Vantara storage – particularly Hitachi Content material Platform and file storage – and goals to supply reference architectures for AI use instances.
Pentaho is a key plank of the Vantara model. It offers AI-based information cataloguing throughout a number of on-premise and cloud information shops, information lakes, and so forth. It permits for metadata tagging, in addition to pipeline and workflow instruments together with ingest and cleanse, with entry controls and information safety, plus migration to information warehouses.
The corporate claims 85% of Fortune 500 corporations are Hitachi Vantara prospects.
How does the cloud match Hitachi Vantara technique?
Hitachi Vantara put hybrid and multi-cloud operations on the coronary heart of its plans when it launched VSP One.
Utilizing its SVOS storage working system, it goals to make information accessible to prospects throughout a number of datacentres and public cloud suppliers.
What’s the Hitachi Vantara container technique?
Hitachi Storage Plug-in for Containers offers integration between Hitachi Vantara Digital Storage Platform One (VSP One) and container orchestrators reminiscent of Kubernetes and Pink Hat OpenShift. It addresses the complexities of storage administration for containers for stateful purposes. These embrace provisioning and enabling persistent storage for containers, in addition to superior storage options and information safety.
The corporate’s Hitachi EverFlex service (see beneath) additionally offers containers as a service to supply central administration of compute, storage, safety and Kubernetes administration.
Hitachi’s preliminary foray into container storage was Hitachi Kubernetes Service, which was constructed out of IP belonging to Containership in 2019, utilizing CSI drivers to handle persistent volumes straight on Kubernetes nodes.
What consumption fashions of buying does Hitachi Vantara provide?
Hitachi Vantara’s EverFlex infrastructure as a service permits prospects to reap the benefits of versatile capability and pay-per-use consumption that may vary from self-managed to totally managed by a 3rd get together throughout the complete IT stack, which might be on-premise or hybrid cloud.
Everflex Consumption Degree permits prospects to scale up and down inside a pre-agreed capability vary. In the meantime, Basis Degree provides superior administration, observability and management over the infrastructure.
Further companies at Basis Degree embrace integration capabilities geared toward current heterogenous environments, provision of assets to plug expertise gaps or administration by Hitachi Vantara, all primarily based on SLAs.
Choices that embrace third-party suppliers, reminiscent of Cisco for networking, are additionally supplied.
The corporate additionally affords Hitachi EverFlex Knowledge Safety as a Service, which is predicated on VSP One infrastructure.
Service administration works by means of the cloud-based Hitachi Providers Supervisor portal, with storage capacities that begin at 50TB and go as much as petabytes. Month-to-month billing consists of a dedicated quantity and a versatile charge that covers extra utilization prices.
