Hitachi is staging its user conference, Hitachi NEXT, this week in Las Vegas, and the company let loose a barrage of storage news Sept. 19 as a result. They’re also launching a new spinoff out of the company.
Following are news highlights from the event:
Hitachi Vantara
More than just an organizational update, Hitachi Vantara is a net-new company that is the result of the convergence of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho. The new entity combines Hitachi’s 107-year experience in operational technology with more than 58 years of IT expertise, providing data management for data insight for customers.
eWEEK will examine this in more detail shortly.
Lumada IoT Platform
Hitachi announced the next generation of its Lumada IoT Platform, which is now available as a commercial software offering for IoT developers and architects. It is aimed at developers in these new IT environments, in addition to co-creation engagements; for example, when organizations bring partners, customers and outside stakeholders into the innovation process and create a solution before general availability.
The newly updated software platform features an intelligent, portable and composable architecture with five major layers:
- Lumada Edge: Functions to track any variety and velocity of data that is then ingested, transformed and analyzed near IoT assets.
- Lumada Core: Provides asset registry, identity and access management, and facilitates creation of Asset Avatars.
- Lumada Analytics: Blends OT and IT data, and uncovers patterns with analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
- Lumada Studio: Provides pre-defined widgets to simplify the creation of dashboard applications, issues alerts and notifications, or straight-through processing.
- Lumada Foundry: Offers foundational services to simplify deployment both on-premise and in the cloud, and provides enhanced security, microservices and support features.
The full stack introduces operational efficiencies by reducing maintenance costs, enhances operational safety and reliability, and improves asset utilization, performance management and product quality.
Lumada Asset Avatars
Among the notable advancements to the Lumada IoT Platform are Asset Avatars, Hitachi’s take on digital twins. Lumada’s Asset Avatars provide a digital representation of physical assets with rich metadata for analytics. They serve as a digital proxy for business and industrial assets to provide data-driven insights on their health and performance with continuously updated sensor values. This helps to eliminate “blind spots” in operation-critical systems by providing improved access to–and insight from–business, machine and human data, which can help users move more rapidly from measurement to management to improvement.
Hitachi IoT Appliance, Powered by Lumada
Hitachi also introduced a new turnkey converged infrastructure appliance that comes pre-loaded with its Lumada IoT Platform software. With the ability to be installed and IoT-ready in under an hour, this plug-and-play appliance is designed to simplify IoT deployments in any number of industrial or commercial enterprise settings.
It can be placed at any location of a customer’s choosing—from edge to core—ensuring data privacy, compliance, network limitations and other challenges can be more easily addressed. The expected result is greater operational performance and output, efficiency, efficacy and extended life of industrial equipment and capital assets, with faster time to insight and business value.
Smart Data Center
Hitachi Vantara is combining infrastructure, analytics and IoT technologies to create the Smart Data Center to ultimately manage complex IT environments. With this software-defined approach, Hitachi said its Smart Data Center can speed time to deploy IT resources and complete administrative tasks; streamline changing and adding of new infrastructure technology; provide holistic on-demand data center operational and commercial views for data-driven decision making, risk management and planning; maximize operational efficiency and cost reduction; and improve business alignment and delivery of service levels.
The fully managed Smart Data Center is now available through Hitachi’s early customer adoption program, which is designed to provide an opportunity for initial customers to co-create the solution before general availability.
Hitachi Enterprise Cloud Container Platform
DevOps and microservices are becoming more mission critical but add complexity and can be difficult for companies to manage. Hitachi Enterprise Cloud Container Platform uses Mesosphere to provide a comprehensive solution designed to assist organizations in reducing their reliance on public cloud resources for their born-in-the-cloud applications, DevOps and microservices architecture. The platform helps customers modernize their data centers, regardless of where they are in the digital transformation process.
Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize
Included in the expansion of the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud offerings is Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize, a private/hybrid cloud platform that fully integrates implementation and deployment services, cloud software and cloud infrastructure. For customers who want to move existing VMware virtualized applications to containers without having to refactor them, Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize provides a complete pre-engineered solution that delivers a public cloud experience with the ability to control the private cloud.
Hitachi Vantara is introducing the new Hitachi Enterprise Cloud solutions into its early customer adoption program for co-creation.
Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI and Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor 2.0
Finally, Hitachi Vantara launched Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) CI, a new family of composable converged infrastructure, and Hitachi UCP Advisor 2.0, the next generation of its management automation and orchestration software for the Hitachi UCP lineup of systems.
Hitachi UCP CI combines compute, storage, networking, automation and management to create a configurable platform for any solution, and UCP Advisor 2.0 provides a single view for management and orchestration, with automated provisioning of all physical, virtual components and bare metal support. Together, they are designed to deliver a data-centric framework to help companies respond to rapidly changing business and market demands.