Organizations continue to face growing pressure to modernize their infrastructure as workloads expand, hybrid-cloud adoption accelerates, and data performance expectations climb. As environments become more complex, the traditional silos between compute, storage, and network management become operational bottlenecks. To address these challenges, many enterprises are moving toward unified, cloud-operated infrastructure management models.
One of the most powerful combinations in this space today is the integration between Cisco Intersight and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems — now strengthened by the recent support for VSP One Block High End, Hitachi’s next-generation flagship block storage architecture. This collaboration offers a compelling path for organizations looking to simplify infrastructure operations, consolidate workloads, and increase performance while maintaining enterprise-class availability and resilience.
In this blog, we explore how Intersight and Hitachi VSP work together, what makes the new VSP One Block High End important, and why this combined solution matters for modern data centers.
Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s SaaS-based lifecycle and operations platform designed to unify the management of compute, network, virtualization, and cloud resources. Delivered as a cloud service or as an optional on-premise appliance, Intersight reduces the operational overhead traditionally required to maintain and update on-premises infrastructure. It also provides sustainability analytics, automation, policy-based configuration, global fleet management, and workload-optimized provisioning.
A critical part of Intersight’s extensibility is the Intersight Assist Appliance, which serves as a bridge between the cloud service and third-party infrastructure components. Intersight Assist allows Hitachi’s VSP One Block systems — to be claimed, monitored, and operated alongside the rest of the Cisco UCS infrastructure. The following figure shows the topology of Cisco Intersight utilizing the Cisco Intersight Assist OVA appliance to manage on-premise resources, now also supporting the VSP One Block High End.
With Assist in place, administrators can onboard Hitachi storage systems, access their operational data, integrate them into provisioning workflows, as well as virtualize 3rd party storage to take advantage of all of the native features of Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS). This architecture enables organizations to manage their infrastructure as part of a unified hybrid environment allowing enterprises to take advantage of:
- Extreme Performance & Scalability
VSP One Block High End is designed for demanding enterprise operations, offering extremely high IOPS, sub-millisecond latency, and massive scalability. Powered entirely by NVMe flash, it accelerates mission-critical applications and ensures high throughput even under heavy multi-tenant load.
- Multi-Workload Consolidation
A distinguishing characteristic of the VSP One portfolio is its ability to support diverse storage types — block, file, object, and even mainframe — within one ecosystem. The VSP One Block High End system extends this capability at scale, enabling organizations to merge historically separate storage environments into a unified data platform.
- Enterprise-Grade Cyber-Resilience
With ransomware and cyber threats escalating, VSP One Block High End integrates advanced security protections, including immutable snapshots, anomaly detection, secure data-isolation flows, and intelligence-driven recovery capabilities.
- Modern High-Speed Connectivity
Support for high-bandwidth technologies such as 100Gb NVMe-over-TCP and 64G Fibre Channel allows organizations to deploy high-performance fabrics that keep pace with modern data-center requirements.
- Unified Storage Management via Cisco Intersight
VSP One Block High End management and configuration can be leveraged in the same portal as the Cisco UCS ecosystem, which provides guided workflows, fleet-wide observability, legacy or 3rd party storage virtualization, and sustainability analytics.
With Intersight Cloud Orchestrator (ICO) users can utilize the following tasks to manage their storage:
As data center complexity grows, a unified operational model becomes not just beneficial, but essential. Cisco Intersight and VSP One Block High End provide the modern, scalable, and future-ready foundation that organizations need to operate confidently in a hybrid, data-driven world.
Cisco Intersight and Hitachi VSP have long been bedrock components in the enterprise infrastructure strategy, but the addition of VSP One Block High End takes this integration to a new level by enabling organizations to use a single tool to manage their datacenter.
Organizations gain a unified, cloud-operated management platform paired with one of the most advanced enterprise-class storage systems on the market. The result is an architecture that simplifies operations, boosts performance, strengthens resilience, and prepares the environment for emerging workloads — from massive virtualization clusters to AI and analytics pipelines. For more information and best practices related to Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Cisco Intersight, refer to the following documents:
Integrating Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform with Cisco Intersight Quick Start Guide
Virtual Storage Platform with Cisco Intersight Cloud Orchestrator Best Practices Guide
Virtual Storage Platform Universal Volume Manager with Cisco Intersight Best Practices Guide
Virtual Storage Platform Ansible Storage Modules with Cisco Intersight Cloud Orchestrator for Remote Replication Implementation Guide
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