Unlocking the Hidden Gems: Finding the Perfect Unified Storage Solution with Hitachi Vantara

Greetings, tech enthusiasts! Are you embarking on a quest to find the ideal unified storage solution for your enterprise? Look no further, for we are about to unravel the mysteries and unveil the gems offered by Hitachi Vantara who used to be called Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) in case any of you were wondering what happened to HDS.

Let's dive a bit deeper into the realm of unified storage solutions and discover the treasures that await!

SVOS - The Storage Virtualization Game Changer

Hitachi SVOS, which I initially implemented in 2005 during my time at the late Silicon Valley Bank, has now been in existence for some 21 years.

SVOS is a well proven technology that has no rival to date in the storage industry.

Its ability to integrate block storage platforms from other vendors and manage them through the Hitachi management GUI allows you to access all Hitachi technology features on these virtualized arrays. This is complemented by affordable third-party maintenance from Hitachi for your legacy storage arrays, enabling seamless and non-disruptive data transfer across different storage platforms, along with extended support for your older storage arrays that continue to function well.

The exorbitant support cost model employed by these OEM storage vendors is what compels you to replace your outdated storage arrays, not because they can't function properly anymore, but because obtaining reasonable ongoing support cost figures for them is near impossible!

Hitachi Vantara has addressed this sticky issue with SVOS and the third-party support they provide, which is indeed a revolutionary development.

This functionality and capability contribute to prolonging the lifespan of these legacy systems and are proving invaluable to numerous governments and commercial enterprises.

It's well-known that 9 out of 10 banks utilize Hitachi Storage, and it's not solely the superior technology that attracts them. Hitachi significantly alters the cost of ownership dynamics!

Hitachi Vantara also offers hybrid cloud capabilities and operational simplicity that you'll appreciate more than any other storage platform once you become familiar with their management tools.

Best of all to consider here with these aforementioned gifts and features is the price.

Once upon a time, HDS was considered a luxury only accessible to corporations with substantial financial resources. Over the past 12 years, however, its affordability has become a well-kept secret in the global Information Technology sector.

This is primarily because they have almost no effective marketing for their product portfolio and its benefits for you.

Hitachi Vantara's marketing materials are designed for dedicated engineers rather than the actual buyers of their products. Their website may leave you questioning what exactly they offer and do, highlighting the complexity issue in their marketing approach.

Previously regarded as the Rolls Royce of the high-end storage platform market, complete with premium price tags, I was amazed to discover that Hitachi's mid-range platforms not only included all the features of the high-end offerings, but also boasted one of the smallest footprints, highest performance, most reliable and cyber-resilient platforms available.

Furthermore, the ability to scale Block 20 to 65 nodes while still offering better pricing than NetApp, Dell, and HPE, among others, is truly remarkable.

You can even scale out the VSP 5000 series in a similar way by the way but not as many systems can be bolted together on the high end side of the equation as what Block 20 fare offers.

Hitachi provide guarantees for performance, availability, and security, along with an assured 4:1 average space savings!

What you might not be aware of is that Hitachi storage platforms also possess Energy Star and other relevant energy reduction certifications, catering to those concerned about sustainability.

In summary, Hitachi storage decreases carbon footprints and is acclaimed for this aspect of its features.

This specific aspect is perhaps the most well-guarded IT secret in the entire world!

I was also impressed by how straightforward and user-friendly these modern Unified storage platforms have become.

Hitachi Vantara offers a genuinely unified storage platform, meaning one device can provide Block, File, and Object capabilities by incorporating gateway devices, with or without their own storage. This allows you to store block, object, and file data on a single storage target, depending on your compliance needs.

Incidentally, the only other OEM vendor that does this is Nutanix. I spent five years at Nutanix working with HCI, so I'm familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of using their offerings.

The challenge that both Hitachi Vantara and Nutanix face is that having a single device handle block, file, and object storage can be problematic for a CISO. This is because a block storage administrator, if knowledgeable, could potentially overwrite the file and object storage.

When faced with this challenge, Nutanix suggest separate dedicated clusters for File and Object storage, allowing the administrators of these clusters to have complete control over that aspect of security.

Hitachi also provides gateway devices for file and object storage that come with their own storage capabilities. Additionally, you can create dedicated storage clusters using Hitachi Vantara Block 20 platforms to address this challenging problem.

What distinguishes Hitachi in the storage industry is that, unlike its competitors, Hitachi Block 20 platforms can accommodate up to 65 devices in a storage cluster. Each device comes equipped with its own CPU, RAM, and storage, ensuring that power and performance scale linearly with increased capacity.

This approach does not lead to a loss in performance. Some OEM storage vendors allow you to add numerous disk trays, but doing so increases the workload on the CPU and RAM due to the additional storage.

These OEM vendors are not adding CPU and RAM to the equation by adding disk trays!

This isn't ideal.

Hitachi Encryption also significantly outperforms what Nutanix provides, and the performance of Hitachi devices compared to Nutanix HCI storage is akin to comparing a Formula 1 racing car to a pedal car.

Hitachi also supports containers and Kubernetes for applications that require rapid data delivery in that format.

Every HCI vendor had to implement unconventional coding techniques in their OS software to equip their platforms with container storage capabilities, which involves certain trade-offs.

I was part of the Nutanix team that initiated these techniques at PayPal, and the development for these HCI vendors is still ongoing there.

With Hitachi, you can obtain stand-alone appliances for each storage type, so if you have security management concerns that necessitate isolation, this won't be an issue.

You can choose to create a VSP One Block platform specifically for file, block, or object storage if your security needs require it. This demonstrates Hitachi's flexibility in adapting to dedicated use case scenarios that necessitate functional isolation.

Some corporations are able to manage tier 2 to 4 storage in this integrated way, which significantly reduces power consumption and capital expenses when considering the overall solution architecture and total cost of ownership (TCO) figures.

Hitachi also owns a company capable of rewriting all your application functionalities to fit a Hybrid cloud solution architecture, ensuring your applications run smoothly like a finely-tuned high-performance racing machine that never falters.

VSP One Unified storage solutions reduce silos and simplify daily operations, freeing up your resources from maintenance tasks and enabling them to drive genuine IT innovation.

Hitachi is actively developing the successor to the Operations Manager tool, named VSP One 360. This new management platform will enhance storage management both in federated and standalone configurations, offering a completely unique solution in the OEM storage manufacturer market.

If you're exploring AI, you'll find that Hitachi's storage solutions, specifically designed for AI operations, distinguish themselves in the market.

The competition among other OEMs is offering products with updated marketing materials but without any new engineering features. The phrase "putting new lipstick on an old pig" comes to mind when examining the realities of these other platforms.

What distinguishes Hitachi Object Storage from its competitors is its AI capability, which it was specifically designed to support. In contrast, competitors primarily offer backup archive solutions that were not created for high-performance object storage requirements.

Similarly, regarding the Hitachi file storage platforms, it's widely accepted that NetApp and Isilon were the unrivaled leaders in basic NAS operations.

Hitachi's acquisition of BlueArc provided them with the fastest and highest-performing NAS platform available, and this remains unchanged.

For high-performance NAS operations, AI demands are best met by Hitachi File platforms, which are unmatched for this particular requirement.

AI has revolutionized the storage industry, and once the dust has settled, Hitachi Vantara remains significantly ahead of its competitors. The notable change is that Hitachi is now remarkably affordable.

With such affordability, it's time to reassess the value you receive from the typical OEM storage vendors. You'll be amazed at the savings and performance with Hitachi Vantara VSP One platforms, which offer the smallest footprint, lowest power consumption, and highest performance products for your data center that also sport unrivaled TCO numbers.

They provide easy operation, quick deployment, and the possibility of zero downtime when utilizing SVOS features, ensuring no disruption to production as you upgrade your data center with Hitachi Vantara technology.

Hitachi provides a variety of guarantees, including performance, high availability (HA), data availability, cyber resilience, effective 4:1* space saving, and guarantees for reducing energy and carbon footprint.

What more could you ask for here? Want to extract value from data you already have but don't know how? Hitachi have tools and experience here that you will be astounded at in terms of extracting huge value from your data. This is an art form Hitachi has specialized in since 2003 and is why they developed SVOS in the first place!

Dell-EMC Under SVOS: Unleashing Possibilities

Fourth and fifth year maintenance costs from traditional storage vendors are so high that new solutions are often much cheaper than the ongoing maintenance cost quotes.

This is intentional. It's a deliberate strategy by these incumbents to encourage you to renew your storage platform every 36 months.

Hitachi know their systems will be running for at least 10 years and their strategic selling model follows this reality.

You won't find Dell, HPE, Pure, VAST or NetApp following this sort of long-term selling cycle!

Integrating legacy systems with the Hitachi Vantara Block 20 platform provides numerous possibilities, including the ability to perform near-instant data migration to other storage platforms that are also virtualized with SVOS, or equipping your Hitachi VSP One Block 20 platform with Hitachi storage.

This is the very feature that won many deals for Hitachi Vantara at the US Federal Government level.

In case you are wondering how many people use Hitachi storage arrays, the answer is a lot.

HPE XP 8 series systems are also rebadged Hitachi VSP 5000 series high end platforms and a great many customers at Federal, State and City levels use Hitachi storage platforms with HPE logos on the box and are blissfully unaware it is in fact a Hitachi Vantara VSP 5000 series storage array.

For those seeking top-notch performance, Energy Star certification, scalability, and a host of data and security assurances, there is only one contender that fulfills and surpasses all these expectations in a single platform!

Pure Storage Under SVOS Control: Pioneering the Future

One big drawback with Pure Block storage platforms is their inability to scale. These platforms are SMB and Commercial organization fare, and they are pretty good platforms from that perspective.

When you want data management and reporting of Islands of storage systems as well as the ability to manage and move data across all your storage systems as if they are one big fat storage array, Hitachi Vantara SVOS is the only game in town.

Hitachi Vantara's entire availability and security guarantees also cover these non-Hitachi platforms plugged into SVOS by the way and they can also bring encryption to the table with the encryption enabled platforms that run SVOS as well.

Want to avoid Pure or Dell storage platforms 4th and 5th year support and maintenance costs? Hitachi offer third party support that will cover you there and enable this for you!

Think certain apps run better on the different virtualized legacy storage platforms with SVOS? Well, it is a cinch to move the data there and try it to see with the available Hitachi tools!

The big banks utilizing SVOS are laughing all the way to the bank on this one, literally!

Choosing Your Path to Excellence

The features and capabilities of Hitachi Vantara VSP One SVOS are unparalleled in any data center.

Contact your local SLED, Commercial, or Enterprise Hitachi Vantara CE today to begin your journey toward scalability, performance, flexibility, seamless migration, and achieving Hybrid cloud excellence!

Final Thoughts

As you traverse the landscape of unified storage solutions, remember that the key to unlocking the hidden gems lies in understanding your unique business needs and selecting a partner that aligns with your vision. Sequrux and Hitachi Vantara Data Management Gurus stand ready to guide you on this exciting journey, offering a tapestry of solutions woven with innovation, reliability, and forward-looking vision.

Embrace the power of data, chart your course towards excellence, and let the unified storage solutions from Hitachi unlock another dimension on your legacy HPE, NetApp, Dell-EMC, or Pure Storage platforms under Hitachi SVOS that illuminate the path to success in the new digital age.

If you're interested in learning more about working with VMware, exploring Red Hat OpenShift as alternatives to both VMware and Nutanix, or curious about how other HCI vendor platforms integrate with Hitachi storage systems, you can be confident that there are numerous use case scenarios. These are validated reference architectures developed by Cisco and specialized channel engineering firms, covering all the options and near every other OEM vendor you seek.

May your data be secure, your insights profound, and your storage solutions as robust as the aspirations of your business!

And seriously ask yourself a new critical question when it comes to the value of your data and that is what return did you actually get from your data?

Hitachi Vantara give you that value and those answers in an eye-opening way! Liberate new streams of revenue by unlocking the true value of your data today!

To begin the process of experiencing exceptional storage consulting services, feel free to contact chaan.beard@hitachivantara.com ASAP, STAT!

*Block 24 platforms offer 2:1 space savings Guarantees