New Hitachi Vantara Storage Offers Focus on Midsize Businesses

Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., has three new storage offers that put the focus on midsize businesses and the partners who deliver them. The new offers bring enterprise grade features to midmarket organizations to help them accelerate their digital transformation efforts.

The vendor on Tuesday announced general availability of a new line of high performance NVMe all-flash storage arrays in its E Series. The company also previewed Hitachi Virtual Storage as a Service. And there’s the new HNAS 5000 family, storage for the distributed enterprise and data center.

Hitachi Vantara’s Kimberly King

“We’re moving more toward a partner-led sales, service and delivery model, especially around the midsize enterprise,” said Kimberly King, global vice president strategic partners and alliances, Hitachi Vantara.

To help partners deliver the new offers, the vendor is training and enabling them, worldwide, to sell, service and deliver the new solutions. Training has been ongoing for the past two months.

“We’ve changed it up in the last year. A key effort is our distinct and fast way of delivering services,” said King. “We’ve taken what we’re known for from an enterprise class – one platform, one management solution, a complete offering – to deliver solid midsize infrastructure.”

Product Features

The latest high-performance NVMe all-flash arrays – the VSP E590 and E790 – expand Hitachi Vantara’s E Series portfolio.

• The new E series features intelligent embedded management capability to simplify installation, automate provisioning and performance management. For large deployments with end-to-end analytics, workflow orchestration and automation, the VSP E Series systems are compatible with Hitachi’s enterprise-grade management software, Hitachi Ops Center.
• The VSP E590 and E790 are 2U platforms that enable best-in-class performance and simplicity with integrated data protection and copy data management capabilities.
• The two new models leverage the same SVOS RF operating system as the VSP 5000 Series for what the company says is guaranteed data reduction and efficiency.
• The midsize business products offer performance and capacity in a condensed footprint at a competitive price.
• AI-powered Advanced Data Reduction (ADR) in the Hitachi VSP E Series portfolio drives capacity efficiencies so midrange customers can maximize limited space.

Storage as a Service

Available through Hitachi Vantara partners, the new Hitachi Virtual Storage-as-a-Service is a storage service for designed for midsize organizations.

It features powerful, predictable storage services, delivered as a managed service either on-premises or colocated. With the flexibility of a consumption-based pricing model, it provides predictable rates and a self-service console, the company said.

Additional benefits include: 99.99% uptime service level with fast submillisecond response time; simplicity for partners to manage and easy for customers to subscribe; enterprise-class service availability and performance that provides customers with cloud economics without relinquishing control; and “faster-to-market” capabilities with an elastic and accelerated storage infrastructure.

Hitachi NAS

Hitachi Vantara designed the new HNAS 5000 family to be a simple, efficient file storage solution for the distributed enterprise and application workload consolidation.

This new series supports both file and block (iSCSI) workloads. It offers virtual cluster support for up to 80 nodes and twice the throughput of its predecessor. It also offers multitenant security designed for up to 64 enterprise virtual servers per namespace. Each has its own security context to segregate network traffic for increased security.

Partners

The company offers partners multiple enablement tools for pricing and recommendations. It also offers stackable incentives, training, sandbox and online labs to expand partner knowledge and accelerate sales opportunities. Furthermore, there are also prebuilt, customizable marketing campaign assets accessible to partners via the Partner Marketing Hub.

King expects to see partners deliver a range of services, such as assessments, upgrades and technology refresh and implementation, to name several, covering the complete life cycle.

While the new offers are available to existing Hitachi Vantara partners, the company has been recruiting new partners. Over the past year, the company has brought on several hundred, worldwide, via selective recruiting. Hitachi Vantara also works with partners through global distributors.

“We’re careful not to oversubscribe partners in any one market. Part of our core methodology here is being predictable, profitable and pioneering,” said King.