Hitachi Vantara brain dump: IoT, servers, containers and self-regulating data centres

Hitachi's data subsidiary Vantara has dumped a load of announcements on attendees of its NEXT 2018 user conference in San Diego.

Servers and stuff

Its first all-NVMe hyperconverged system is the V124N, a development of the all-flash V123F announced in June. Like that model, the new kit is a 1U dual-socket server, but where the V123F has a single DC P4800X 375GB 2.5-inch Optane drive for caching, the V124N can have four Optane cache drives and eight other NVMe flash drives, for a total of 72TB of raw capacity.

Hitachi said this means it has a 3X increase in IOPS performance and 4X lower latency compared to the prior all-flash UCP HC system, meaning, we understand, the V123F, but it doesn't provide actual model numbers.

Hitachi's UCP converged infrastructure systems are to get new support for its DS7000 servers and the DS225 server, which were announced in June with Tesla GPUs. Its rack-scale systems will also receive DS225 support.

The Hitachi Solution for Databases products get Hadoop added as an offload target for the Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), based on UCP RS and Pentaho data integration. MongoDB is already supported as an offload target.

The ponderously named Hitachi Solution for the SAP HANA Platform has newly certified SAP HANA appliances based on Hitachi UCP CI with its DS7000 series servers, and enhanced management integration via Hitachi storage and server adapters for the SAP HANA Cockpit.

UCP CI configurations with Hitachi DS7000 series are also planned to support Virtual HANA (vHANA) and other VMware-based workloads. UCP CI configurations with Hitachi DS7000 series servers are also available now for supported SAP HANA and Oracle environments.

The optional all-NVMe chassis for UCP HC systems are expected to be generally available in November 2018, and will be complemented by all-NVMe Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) options for standalone deployment or within UCP CI in 2019.

The Hitachi DS225 with Nvidia GPU support and new mix-and-match server options for UCP CI and RS will be generally available in November. The latest release of UCP Advisor with new deployment manager functionality will be generally available in October 2018.

Objects

The Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) gets stronger S3 compliance, plus extensions for compliance capabilities, like retention and privileged delete, for application data ingested via the S3 API. There is improved event-based retention to align with US Department of Defense Electronic Records Management requirements.

HCP can be run in appliances or software-only and can now, with VSAN support, be run in hyperconverged environments such as UCP HC.

It adds replication before tiering to improve data protection and, with Hitachi Content Monitor, customers can aggregate and visualise system metrics from multiple HCP clusters into customisable dashboards.

Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere (HCP Anywhere) can now extend sync-based file-sharing data services from data centres to remote and branch offices, replacing filers there and end-user devices. The HCP Anywhere Edge product is a cloud storage gateway option that keeps active data in local storage with the bulk of the file estate stored in data centres.

It natively supports Microsoft Windows SMB 2 and 3. More info is available about HCP here.

Containers

The Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC) Container Platform (CP) gets better security through a partnership with Aqua Security, adding run-time protection, encryption, vulnerability scanning and micro-segmentation. The aim is to detect and prevent suspicious activity and simplify enforcement of corporate security policies and regulatory compliance.

HEC CP gets multi-cloud management with a single cloud management interface to private, hybrid and public cloud deployments with the ability to run workloads in these environments without having to use proprietary public cloud APIs, interfaces and methods.

It adds a pre-tested, pre-integrated catalog of DevOps and data services which enables one-click, self-service deployments of Kubernetes clusters, Spark, Cassandra and Kafka.

This HEC Container Platform is available now. More information available here.

Fancy software thermostat for data centres

Smart Data Center is a subscription service designed to optimise global data centre service health, capacity management, performance management and cooling. Enhancements move it on from its initial focus on compute and storage resource management towards facility infrastructure.

It gets continuous optimisation using AI-Driven Cooling, via a Vigilent partnership, intelligent SAN optimisation and automated provisioning of heterogeneous storage.

The Vigilent tech uses machine learning, temperature sensors, and closed-loop control to enable Smart Data Center to proactively monitor and analyse data centre cooling, self-correct temperature and airflow issues, and provide administrators with the ability to specify the exact maximum air temperature delivered to each rack in the data centre.

The SAN optimisation uses machine learning and delivers, it's claimed, real-time, continuous optimisation of SAN resources with predictive analytics, hot and cold storage spot identification, tiering of data to the right cost/performance, dynamic dashboards and AI simulations of future storage scenarios.

Self-optimising data centres here we come. More information here.

Lastly, Hitachi's Lumada (industrial IoT stuff) gets Maintenance Insights; data-driven, artificial intelligence-based IoT products using prescriptive and predictive algorithms that help customers anticipate breakdowns and guide them on necessary maintenance repairs.

Basically the Lumada IoT gear tells you when it's going to break. ®