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Primer Series: Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara is known worldwide for its digital solutions that help businesses optimize their operations with data-driven technologies and services that enhance agility, resilience and efficiency. These encompass data management, application modernization and AI-driven approaches.

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This was originally published in December 2020

Do you ever attend meetings where the conversation turns to an unfamiliar technology? Suddenly, a bunch of names and acronyms are being thrown around and you have no idea what they mean. Confused, you scan the room and notice that everyone else is nodding as if they know exactly what's being discussed.

We've all been there before. To help our valued customers make sense of it all, the engineers at WWT offer a continuing series of 'primer' articles to provide a basic understanding of emerging products and technologies. This article introduces the unique digital operations and infrastructure solutions of Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of global technology brand Hitachi, Ltd. and a valued WWT technology partner.

 What Hitachi Vantara brings to the digital solutions landscape

Hitachi Vantara is known worldwide for its digital solutions that help businesses optimize their operations with data-driven technologies and services that enhance agility, resilience and efficiency. These encompass data management, application modernization and AI-driven approaches.

Widely respected among enterprise-level organizations, Hitachi Vantara was recently recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms. The company's promise is to resolve digital challenges through its formidable industrial and digital capabilities as well as its data and applications, helping to develop new revenue streams, unlock competitive advantages, reduce costs, enable compliance and enrich customer experiences.

What WWT finds most unique and valuable about Hitachi Vantara – besides an unsurpassed standard of reliability in its product offerings – is its unique global perspective, gained from its affiliation with the greater Hitachi Corporation, which operates many multiple lines of business across a wealth of industries, including finance, healthcare and manufacturing. Hitachi Vantara understands from its own experience how diverse businesses work, what their needs are, and how to craft reliable, end-to-end solutions that deliver predictable outcomes. Its portfolio of cost-effective solutions offers the high availability, scalability and flexibility today's successful businesses require. 

WWT is pleased to highlight a few of the joint offerings we provide to customers.

 Digital infrastructure 

 Achieve enterprise-class NVMe performance and scale with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series.

Storage of all kinds – flash, object, network attached and more – is a key offering for Hitachi Vantara, tailored to a variety of environments and needs. WWT is especially impressed with the 5000 Series, an enterprise scale out platform that offers powerful, predictable, flexible performance and efficiency for workloads ranging from microservices to mainframes.

Supporting a range of service levels from SAP apps to simple VMware workloads, the platform's key benefits also include high availability regardless of scale, using an identical OS across all devices for ease of management – a bullet-proof architecture that has proven to be reliable for over two decades.

Another critical feature of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series is the power of its virtualization functionality – being able to "sweat" older assets to derive maximum utilization. Competitive systems can be migrated behind the Hitachi solution, where they can take advantage of Hitachi features such as data protection and snapshots – effectively making the older boxes appear to be part of the Hitachi solution.

It is for all these features – powerful, predictable performance and reliability across all workloads, virtualization capabilities and more – that WWT aligns with Hitachi Vantara's flagship digital infrastructure solution.

 Ensure availability with converged infrastructure from Hitachi and Cisco.

Partnerships with leading technology innovators are key to WWT's industry reputation. Hitachi teams with WWT partner Cisco to offer the Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure, which assists organizations that want to remove IT complexity, increase agility, stay compliant with data security requirements and promote reliability. It offers robust storage and high availability and it's architected for any workload at cloud scale, with a data-driven foundation to deliver superior customer outcomes.

The Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure allows organizations to securely store, manage, move, enrich, activate and monetize data. The platform employs AI-based management to simplify operations, as well as system-level data insights that enable greater data center efficiency. This purpose-built solution offers best-in-class architecture backed by a 100 percent data availability guarantee.

WWT works with the Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure to evangelize for a data-driven culture that supports current and future business needs.

 Make your business smarter with intelligent data discovery through Hitachi Content Intelligence.

It's a near-universal frustration: time, money and productivity wasted, and valuable insights and opportunities missed looking for hard-to-find content, only to encounter failed search results – especially when searching across multiple unconnected systems. 

Hitachi created a time- and cost-saving solution: Content Intelligence interconnects everything, combining structured meta-data and unstructured data files regardless of location – on-prem, off-prem or in the cloud. It eliminates "dark data," optimizes data quality and enables comprehensive searches.

Content Intelligence is especially useful in Europe for IT organizations that need to practice stringent data-storage protocols to remain GDPR-compliant. For example, when an individual requests to be "forgotten" by a system for privacy purposes, Content Intelligence makes it easier to find all instances of that individual and target those files for deletion.

 Improve IT operational efficiencies with Hitachi Ops Center.

Businesses can simplify IT operations management for their storage ecosystem with an AI-driven operations tool that ties together all storage offerings. The Hitachi Ops Center helps speed analytics, automation and integration, managing the data infrastructure with a unified management suite.

Hitachi Ops Center delivers operational insights to make informed decisions to meet service level agreements, automates new resource delivery with best practices to lower risks and simplifies data protection and recovery operations to safeguard critical assets. Hitachi Ops Center features four elements:

  • Administrator configures and aligns storage resources to business needs
  • Analyzer reveals insights with end-to-end resource analysis
  • Automator orchestrates data center resource provisioning
  • Protector performs data protection and recovery operations

 Digital solutions

 Hitachi's Lumada software for IIoT

Gartner recognized Hitachi as a Leader in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT (IIoT) platforms after evaluating Hitachi's Lumada software. Lumada combines an ecosystem of proven Hitachi technologies with advanced analytics and data management capabilities.

For example, an aluminum manufacturer customer uses Lumada video intelligence LIDAR sensors to right-size ingots as they come off the production line, reducing wasted time and money lost due to re-dos. In another use case, Hitachi's Lumada helps enhance operational efficiency at a world-renowned theme park, deploying software for edge intelligence, video insights and maintenance insights. Hitachi Vantara answered the challenge of how to gather real-time and predictive insights about the operation of the park's attractions and shows.

This resource ecosystem enables customers to easily develop and deploy IIoT solutions more quickly, accelerating time to insight and leading to improved business outcomes.

 WWT can leverage these Hitachi Vantara capabilities and more.

Customers today are dealing with unprecedented business circumstances. WWT and Hitachi Vantara offer reliable solutions that will help them lower their cost of operation in a predictable, powerful and flexible way.

This has been just a glimpse of the data-driven digital solutions and services that WWT partner Hitachi Vantara brings to enhance agility, resilience and efficiency for a global customer base.

Lines of business across virtually every industry turn to Hitachi Vantara for reliable, robust digital solutions that integrate seamlessly, thanks to decades of professional prowess delivering positive business outcomes.

 Learn more 

We invite you to explore the transformative digital solutions from this innovative WWT technology partner:

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