Bob Madaio, vice president of Integrated Solution Marketing at Hitachi

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and VMware Global Innovation OEM Partner of the Year, announced Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) RS series, a fully integrated, software defined data center (SDDC) rack-scale platform, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation™. Hitachi UCP RS enables customers to embrace hybrid cloud for faster time to market and pay as-you-go economics. It also gives customers the freedom to optimize their IT investments by leveraging private and public cloud as an agile extension to their business. UCP RS provides flexibility to customers to either deploy integrated SDDC stack or build their own using Hitachi’s vSAN ready node and VMware software.

Alongside the launch of Hitachi UCP RS, the company has enhanced its hyper converged system Unified Compute Platform (UCP) HC. Hitachi UCP HC all-flash and hybrid systems are now enabled with non-volatile memory (NVMe) and new sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors to deliver faster performance and reduced operating costs, maximizing business value for customers. This enhancement allows for higher performance, lower latency and accelerated workloads through the use of modern data center technology.

John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, Integrated Systems, VMware said, “Hitachi’s strong track record of innovation led them to be recognized as VMware Global Innovation OEM Partner of the Year at VMware Partner Leadership Summit 2017. This new Hitachi UCP RS solution powered by VMware Cloud Foundation is no exception. The solution improves productivity, delivers faster time to business value and accelerates the customer’s ability to realize the true power of their data.”

“Open questions exist regarding the extent to which advances in SDI technology can support a common virtual data center foundation upon which improved end-to-end IT service interoperability, resilience, elasticity and agility across a hybrid cloud infrastructure can be effectively realized,” according to Market Trends: Software-Defined Infrastructure — Who Can Benefit? (Gartner, June 2017). In addition, the report states that, “Given the current state of public cloud service deployment and the maturity state of SDI, one of two options is possible: The first is an application-independent, common virtual data center infrastructure that can run atop an existing private data center infrastructure, a public cloud service or a combination of the two. This variation is called infrastructure-upward.”

Understanding the new demands placed on IT by data center modernization initiatives, Hitachi has collaborated with VMware to develop the fully integrated, turnkey Hitachi UCP RS system to deliver reliable IT infrastructure for hybrid cloud deployments. Hitachi UCP RS also helps to minimize the complexity and guesswork of deploying and managing IT by uniquely automating provisioning, managing and monitoring for SDDCs, giving customers a competitive advantage, and delivering faster time to market and high availability of business applications.

“Our deep, collaborative partnership with VMware has led to the creation of powerful systems and innovative solutions that help our customers modernize their IT environments and put data at the center of their business,” said Bob Madaio, vice president of Integrated Solution Marketing at Hitachi. “With the launch of our UCP RS in addition to advancements in our hyper converged UCP HC, Hitachi is empowering our customers to transform their IT environments, accelerate hybrid cloud deployments and further their digital business initiatives.”

Hitachi UCP Portfolio

The UCP family of converged, hyper converged and rack-scale systems provides enterprise, departmental and cloud service provider environments with a simple path to IT modernization and digital transformation. UCP solutions enable IT organizations to accelerate time to production, automate operations and reduce administrative costs by providing prevalidated, pretested and factory-built converged and hyper converged infrastructure systems.