In a move to help customers reduce simplify and manage their IT infrastructures, Hitachi Vantara has introduced a new data protection-as-a-service (DPaaS) offering while also expanding its existing storage-as-a-service (STaaS) managed services to include object storage and non-disruptive upgrade capabilities.

These moves give IT departments new tools to handle important infrastructure tasks while providing guaranteed performance and pay-for-what-you-use pricing for businesses.

One aim of the new services is to allow CIOs and other IT executives to meet the technology needs of their companies while freeing up IT workers to handle more critical tasks, Gary Breder, director of cloud solutions and services for Hitachi Vantara, told Channel Futures.

Hitachi Vantara’s Gary Bender

“Hitachi Vantara offers these services with hardware and software for data protection and storage,” he said. “We are selling the services, the outcomes and the results.”

The hardware and applications are owned by Hitachi Vantara and are used to provide the services to customers, along with billing based on usage, support and ongoing operations.

“What we’re trying to do is to get as close as possible to a cloud experience for those who need it,” using dedicated equipment behind a customer’s firewall, said Breder.

The services require a multiyear contract due to the investments for the equipment, but they are scalable for performance and capacity as a customer’s needs change, he added. Initially, enough equipment is installed to handle up to twice the capacity that a customer thinks they need.

For the channel, both the new DPaaS and revamped STaaS products offer new opportunities, said Breder.
The STaaS product, which was first announced a year ago, gets new capabilities that will help channel partners better cover a customer’s entire storage portfolio, he said. The addition of object storage capabilities now bolsters the original product’s file and block storage capabilities, while new non-disruptive upgrades can be done to swap out storage devices and other equipment as needed.

“We’re taking away all the headaches that a customer can have when they do an upgrade of a storage device,” said Breder.

The STaaS product also give channel partners added capabilities they can sell to their customers as the storage market shrinks due to gains by large public cloud providers, he said.

“These new products give them some things to fight back with,” said Breder. “Customers want to talk to the people who can use the right tool for the job and that’s now available to our partner network.”

In addition, by providing these services, partners don’t have to start building them from scratch and can instead focus on reselling them while serving specialized requirements for their customers, he said.

Ashish Nadkarni, an analyst with IDC, told Channel Futures that the latest Hitachi Vantara services can help customers and partners by providing needed infrastructure and fixed fees based on usage without having to lay out money for capital expenses.

IDC’s Ashish Nadkarni

“It also reduces pressure on your IT people investments because now a vendor takes care of it instead of your IT people having to do it,” said Nadkarni. “It’s no longer your headache. It’s the vendor’s headache.”

The new DPaaS capabilities are something that Hitachi Vantara OEM channel partners have been asking for because they have been seeing demand for the services, said Nadkarni.

“Rather than offering it on their own, they would rather the vendor do it,” he added. “From Hitachi’s perspective, they are really doing it for the installed base. They are giving them a service they may want or need rather than having them go somewhere else for it.”