Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Hitachi Vantara is a company created for the value of data.

If the merger of Hitachi Data System, Pentaho and Hitachi Insight Group in 2017 marks the official opening of the first phase of Hitachi Vantara, then at this year's Hitachi NEXT 2019 conference, Hitachi Vantara announced the merger of Hitachi Consulting and launched a series of important new products and service upgrades, including VSP 5000 series, Hitachi Ops Center, Lumada and so on, which marks the second phase of Hitachi Vantara.

This is like a data value manifesto of Hitachi Vantara, which means that at this stage, Hitachi Vantara has increasingly improved products, services and solutions that can help users realize data value with more comprehensive capabilities around edge, core, cloud and other environments. In fact, under the trend of the integration of IT, CT and OT, the business processes, products and services, and business models of enterprises and organizations will be reshaped around data, which is becoming the basis of all digital innovation, and what Hitachi Vantara does is of great value to users.

DataOps: closed loop for data value according to the "New Vision of the Global Digital economy 2019" report, the digital economy of 47 major countries reached US $30.2 trillion in 2018, accounting for 40.3% of GDP. The growth rate of digital economy in many countries is higher than that of GDP in the same period, and the transformation of traditional industries to digital has become the dominant trend of digital economy.

Take the industrial manufacturing industry as an example, achieving a 1% increase in efficiency produces huge economic value. With the help of industrial big data and industrial Internet of things related technologies to monitor and simplify industrial production processes, improve production efficiency and reduce production costs, it is considered to be one of the important steps in the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry. With the accelerated pace of user digital transformation, new workloads such as AI, machine learning, deep learning, big data, AR/VR, Internet of things and so on appear more and more frequently. Not only that, in addition to the existing data center, users also need to face a variety of challenges to the realization of data value brought by edge, cloudy and other new environment.

In Hitachi Vantara's view, changes in workload and architectural environment make the realization of data value require new methods and theories. Therefore, the word DataOps was mentioned repeatedly at the Hitachi NEXT 2019 conference. The so-called DataOps,Hitachi Vantara is regarded as a methodology, not a product, service or solution. DataOps is an enterprise data management model in the AI era, through which users can seamlessly connect data consumers and data creators, so as to quickly discover and use the full value of all data in the whole organizational structure.

As we all know, data value mining is inseparable from data collection, transmission, management, analysis and sharing. However, the reality is that it is common for users to have difficulties in data collection, low data quality, small and inefficient data analysis, and low utilization rate of data value. According to the latest data from IDC, more than half of the global data were generated in the past two years, but only 2% of the data have been analyzed and mined. The existing traditional methods and theories can not help enterprises and organizations to analyze most of the data.

The value of data can only be realized through analysis and mining, but the existing methods and theories can not help enterprises and organizations analyze most of the data. DataOps is a key to solve these problems, which can help improve data quality, speed up production cycle and achieve more outstanding data management, and constantly optimize its use of data. Help enterprises fully release the value of previously unused data.

In order to support the data management model of DataOps, we must first have comprehensive and reliable products, services and solutions, accumulate rich experience in the field of data management and analysis, have a more in-depth understanding of the industry business, and use technology and products to combine the business with it, so as to fully mine and analyze the data. As Dai Jianping, global vice president and general manager of Hitachi Vantara in China, said: "Hitachi Vantara has only one purpose in a series of actions in recent years: to help users save, manage and use data well, and ultimately help users realize the value of data."

Therefore, through the Hitachi NEXT 2019 conference, we can clearly see that Hitachi Vantara is making every effort to build capabilities in terms of technology, products, consulting, services, solutions, etc., to help users maximize the value of their data through DataOps.

VSP 5000 Series: the world's fastest storage system at this conference, Hitachi Vantara officially launched the VSP 5000 series, as well as the new Hitachi Operations Center (Hitachi Ops Center) management software and an updated version of the Hitachi storage virtualization operating system (SVOS). These three products can be seen as a blockbuster product release of Hitachi Vantara at the core layer, which can perfectly solve the various data challenges at the core layer of the data center.

In Dai Jianping's view, the Hitachi Vantara VSP 5000 series is a product that will change the competitive situation and demand of the market. It can not only help users cope with the challenges of the data center, but also set new industrial standards for the industry. Indeed, according to the parameters published by Hitachi Vantara, the VSP 5000 Series is based on the new Hitachi Accelerated Fabric and provides a record 21 million IOPS, a minimum latency of 70 microseconds, and up to 69PB-level data capacity.

This year is the year when many manufacturers update their high-end all-flash memory systems. Earlier, DELL EMC's PowerMax offered up to 15 million IOPS, while Huawei's Dorado V6 had a performance of 20 million IOPS. Hitachi Vantara VSP 5000 is indeed better in terms of performance.

Hitachi Accelerated Fabric plays an important role in achieving such excellent performance. Accelerated Fabric establishes an internal connection between the controller and flash memory and offloads IO work from the controller through FPGA. The architecture uses directly connected access and works with FPGA to achieve high IOPS performance.

In addition to the architecture, VSP 5000 also has the advantages of SAS architecture, NVMe and SCM technologies. The VSP 5000 series of products with the new deduplication optimizer (dedupe optimizer) use advanced machine learning algorithms to dynamically optimize the deduplication process according to block size, usage characteristics and other characteristics. By reducing duplicate data during data writing devices and processing, the new solution enables 7:1 data streamlining while minimizing performance impact.

In addition, the VSP 5000 Series is designed for always-on business, and its self-healing Istroke O architecture and four internal switching bus designs provide industry-leading 99.999999% device reliability for the VSP 5000 Series. Hitachi Vantara believes that the VSP 5000 Series, as the world's fastest storage system, is suitable for any workload of any size and can create the cornerstone of a powerful next-generation storage and infrastructure for enterprise data centers.

In addition to the VSP 5000 series of hardware products, Hitachi Vantara also launched a new Hitachi Ops Center management software. This product conforms to the current technology trend, introduces artificial intelligence technology into the management and operation of infrastructure, automates up to 70% of tasks, and realizes automated operation and maintenance management and resource allocation of data centers.

Lumada: accelerating data-based innovation is different from other companies. Hitachi Vantara benefits from Hitachi Group's century-long accumulation in industry, making it one of the few companies in the industry that can perfectly integrate IT and OT technologies. Hitachi Vantara's Lumada platform has been the "visionary" quadrant in the magic quadrant of Gartner's industrial Internet of things platform for many years. From this conference, Hitachi Vantara began to further improve its expectations for Lumada, hoping to expand Lumada business beyond the Internet of things to help enterprises and industrial customers solve the data challenges commonly faced in any industry and in any scenario.

Hitachi Vantara has updated a range of Lumada products and services:

Lumada Data Services: a suite of software services that help customers manage an increasingly complex data ecosystem through an intelligent data base. Lumada Data Services includes integration with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), Pentaho, etc. With Lumada Data Services, users can cost-effectively manage all their data assets across data centers and clouds, including structured, unstructured, and edge data.

Lumada Data Lake: an "intelligent" data lake product. Lumada Data Lake can self-optimize, intelligently place datasets in the best place, and continuously organize them to avoid data flooding and analyze them anytime, anywhere.

Lumada Edge Intelligence: a new set of software and proven edge hardware devices that enable organizations to manage and analyze data at the edge of the network to address digital use cases such as the Internet of things, connected products, immersive customer experience, remote and disconnected sites, and branch offices.

Obviously, the intention of Hitachi Vantara Lumada is to help users cope with various data challenges, including edge, data center, and multi-cloud through a data service platform, so that data services can be easily and quickly implemented in the cloud, data center or edge, thus accelerating data-based innovation.

End-to-end cloud services: accelerating hybrid cloud applications in 2018, Hitachi Vantara completed its acquisition of REAN Cloud, gaining key capabilities and expertise in cloud migration and application modernization. At this conference, Hitachi Vantara made its first major announcement after completing the reorganization of the cloud services portfolio, a series of cloud services portfolio covering cloud migration, application modernization, operations hosting, operation and maintenance, consulting and Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and other services.

There is no doubt that hybrid or cloudy clouds will be an important trend for a long time to come. Even AWS, a cloud computing giant that has long advocated public clouds, launched hybrid cloud products last year. According to Forrester's survey of customers, 68% of respondents said they planned to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy in 2018, up from 29% in 2012.

Therefore, as hybrid clouds are gradually adopted among more and more users, we can clearly see that data needs interconnection between clouds, and there needs to be a good data path between clouds so that data can flow better; in addition, cross-cloud management of data and applications is also an important trend in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. The ability of workloads to migrate in both directions between different clouds will also be an important demand for hybrid clouds. Therefore, to meet the needs of users for hybrid cloud can be said to be the direction that most manufacturers are actively layout.

In the range of cloud service offerings released this time, Hitachi Vantara supports infrastructure environments from edge to core to the cloud, and has integrated multiple functions of REAN Cloud to achieve data consistency across edge, local, and cloud environments, resulting in faster deployment, significantly improved business effectiveness and superior operational and cost efficiency.

Among them, Hitachi Cloud Migration and Application Modernization Service (Hitachi Cloud Migration and Application Modernization Services) adopts a neutral multi-cloud strategy to help users achieve unified data services for various applications and workloads in edge, local and cloud environments; it can realize cloud migration and application modernization services for the top three cloud platforms of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; and optimizes the usage of application data and DevSecOps practices in hybrid cloud environments.

In terms of Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC) services, HEC has added a unified pane view that supports private and public cloud resource management and delivers it as part of Hitachi managed services, including using VMware cloud solutions for the first time and adding them to HEC preset and prefabricated directory frameworks; providing unified billing and real-time analysis services.

The essence of hybrid cloud is to give users a choice, and they can flexibly choose "cloud" and configure resources according to their own business needs, so as to achieve faster access speed and more flexible business architecture, and maximize resources and efficiency. In fact, from the perspective of data value realization, opening up the access between the edge, the data center and the cloud is not only of high practical value to users, but also something that Hitachi Vantara must do to improve its ability around data value. The launch of a series of cloud services at this conference indicates that Hitachi Vantara is accelerating the building and layout of its cloud capabilities.

Chinese market: it is worth looking forward to before the establishment of Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi Data System has worked hard in China for many years, and many of its storage system products have a deep user base in domestic finance, manufacturing, telecommunications and other industries. With the formal establishment of Hitachi Vantara in 2017, Hitachi Vantara has been bringing more new products, services and solutions to the Chinese market in the past two years.

At this conference, Dai Jianping revealed that the biggest advantage of Hitachi Vantara in the domestic market is that it can provide differentiated product and technical value around data, which has enabled Hitachi Vantara to maintain rapid growth in the Chinese market in the past three years. " In addition to storage products, some Hitachi Vantara products actually had a very good user base in China. For example, before Pentaho joined Hitachi Vantara, it already had a large user base in China. A number of products released at this conference will undoubtedly further enhance the competitiveness of Hitachi Vantara in the Chinese market. " Dai Jianping said.

According to Dai Jianping, Hitachi Vantara will focus on the development of the Chinese market in five aspects:

First of all, we should continue to strengthen the coverage and depth of the industry, and get closer to the customer needs of key industries such as finance, manufacturing, government affairs, health care, and so on.

The second is to further optimize and enhance the ecosystem of Hitachi Vantara in China, and make the ecosystem stronger through a series of incentive and training programs for partners.

The third is to strengthen and extend the coverage and tentacles of services, establish more service centers and spare parts supply centers, and enhance the service capacity of Hitachi Vantara in China.

The fourth is to further enhance the solution capability of Hitachi Vantara in China, combined with the industry attributes of customers, to create solutions in line with the industry characteristics of the Chinese market.

Finally, it is to increase the intensity and environment of co-creation with customers, and innovate together with partners, ISV and customers to meet new and forward-looking needs.

Dai Jianping also revealed that Hitachi Vantara is planning and implementing cloud-related services in the Chinese market with a rhythm, and is actively maintaining exchanges and negotiations with cloud service providers, and relevant plans will be further announced in the future.

Overall, Hitachi NEXT 2019 is like a data manifesto for Hitachi Vantara to enter the second phase of the company's development. A number of heavy-duty product and service upgrades have been unveiled, indicating that Hitachi Vantara is at the forefront of the industry, building a comprehensive capability around data value, which can give users more capabilities for digital transformation.

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