The Japan-based information technology (IT) firm Hitachi Vantara on Tuesday announced that it has already streamlined its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) options to help Filipino businesses to simplify their procurement, deployment, and maintenance systems.

The updated Hitachi Vantara Unified Compute Platform (UCP) HC is now as a VMware vSAN Global Partner Appliance, a new category of HCI deployment options. It also announced an update to Hitachi UCP RS.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the elements of a traditional data center: storage, compute, networking, and management.

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“Hitachi Vantara offers distinct operational efficiency with flash– accelerated, converged, and hyperconverged infrastructure, which makes it stand out,” said Varghese Mathew, Business Director, Hitachi Vantara Philippines.

“It also achieves unmatched reliability, flexibility, automation, and performance for the most demanding workloads, which is definitely a must in staying competitive in the Philippines market,” he added.

Hitachi Vantara is the result of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho being combined under one umbrella in 2017.

Hitachi Vantara UCP portfolio

Hitachi Vantara UCP portfolio includes both its converged and HCI systems, with the latter falling under the UCP HC moniker. Hitachi UCP HC integrated appliances are powered by VMware vSAN and they benefit from native integration with the VMware software stack.

It said that the Hitachi management and orchestration software for UCP systems, UCP Advisor, delivers a flexible operations model that reduces OPEX. It provides a single view with automated provisioning of all physical, virtual components, and supports administration at the bare metal level.

“Its ability to automatically apply patches, code upgrades, other system administrations function such as health and monitoring of the HCI environment minimizes applications downtime. Leveraging familiar VMware toolsets enable faster, easier deployments while accelerating time-to-value and reducing risks,” it said.

The available UCP HC configurations include support for hybrid (disk and flash), all-flash, all NVMe (Intel Optane SSDs), and GPU (specifically NVIDIA Tesla cards) types of technologies, accommodating a wide range of use cases, especially for high-performance workloads.

Hitachi said a host of additional options are also available to those UCP-HC systems leveraging its value-added software, such as Hitachi Ops Center Protector and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) for copy data management and file and objects services, respectively.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is one of the most common use cases of vSAN solutions

By having an update on its HCI options, the digital infrastructure and solutions firm said it would help businesses with improved data protection and cost savings through avoidance of the need for any virtual desktop data backups in such solutions.

“While doing so, this solution empowers end users to perform their own file recoveries and protect their data from ransomware attacks too. Combined with VMWare’ NSX technologies, Hitachi is able to provide individually firewalled desktops along with the applications and data,” it said.

This would also provide unique flexibility to extend the UCP HC series and VMware Cloud Foundation environment beyond hyperconverged infrastructure into external disk capacity from SAN storage with storage policy-based automation and common lifecycle management.

“With our partnership with Hitachi Vantara, we are now in a unique position to enable organizations with a next-generation infrastructure that offers greater simplicity, agility, and security, providing Filipino enterprises with a robust digital foundation to accelerate business innovation as they grow and scale across the region,” said Walter So, Country Manager, VMware Philippines.

VMware technologies enable customers to embrace private, public, or hybrid cloud strategies with absolute confidence on what businesses demand, which is equivalent to faster time to market, pay-as-you-go economics, hardened security against data breaches, and greater levels of automation.

Hitachi Vantara is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., that guides its customers in solving their digital challenges.