Can Hitachi Vantara build 'ecosystem, stack, platform' universe with enough granular clout?
Hitachi Vantara continues its development in the post-HDS post-Pentaho post- ‘the other bit’ (okay we know it was Hitachi Insight Group) amalgam that has seen the company now build its current stack (it would say platform) of combined software and hardware engineering.
Platform indeed… the firm now focuses on its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family of converged, hyperconverged and rack-scale systems.
All which combined hardware and software power are intended to run what Hitachi Vantara has called its Application Ecosystem Solutions — or ‘apps’, for short.
So hang on, that was ecosystem, stack and platform and we’ve barely touched on product. Has Hitachi Vantara become so weighty that it forgets how to be granular?
Is Hitachi Vantara building the universe… and everything too?
To clarify what the company is doing, there are new certified applications optimised for SAP HANA, Oracle databases, VMware and big data analytics frameworks.
Hitachi UCP systems use modular building blocks of infrastructure that are pretested and validated to meet specific needs. It’s all about automation (minimising the human planning element) and combining compute, network and storage components to optimise performance.
Moving apps, moving workloads
Also in the mix now is the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor (UCP Advisor), an IT management and orchestration software offering. This software supports ‘full automation’ over server, network and storage components.
“UCP Advisor with customised workflows lets IT staff move applications and workloads between clouds and UCP systems in a smart and automated way to rapidly deliver new IT services. The latest release of UCP Advisor continues to enhance automation, including policy-based provisioning to speed initial deployment with less risk,” noted the company, in a product statement.
The firm also offers a modular converged architecture, Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI (UCP CI) systems provide tooling for modern datacentre infrastructures.
“UCP CI systems with a management and automation toolset that uses UCP Advisor, enable the operational efficiencies of virtualisation and increase the performance of mission-critical applications. The systems simplify the control of both virtual and physical infrastructure to support a wide range of enterprise and cloud workloads,” noted the company, in a product statement.
Extending the product notes here, there is also Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC (UCP HC) systems to make hyperconverged (clue, that’s what HC stands for) easier to deploy.
Last to note here is the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS (UCP RS) is a rack-scale (did you see the RS?) system designed to simplify the deployment of an agile data infrastructure at scale.
Integrated, optimised and certified
Where Hitachi Vantara is going with all of this is the development of pre-integrated, optimised and certified infrastructure software and hardware configurations.
There are also reference architectures, combined with application-centric professional services… so it’s tested systems and best practices for data management… and this (in our opinion) is where Hitachi Vantara would insist that, yes, it is still granular down to individual application and data workflow needs.
Granular optimisation and integration intricacies in application ecosystem and data workflow health are tough to get right once you start going converged, hyperconverged or any shape of rack-scale — and that’s before you start debugging. Hitachi Vantara is playing for a big wins if it gets all this right.
Image: Hitachi