Converged & Hyperconverged Infrastructure

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The Power of AND

By Nicholas Winkworth posted 10-11-2019 01:38

  
The Power of “AND”.

This week in Las Vegas our customers have been gathering to learn more about Powering Good with new products, Hitachi’s DataOps vision and strategies to maximize the value of data in their organizations. (Hitachi NEXT 2019 )

There are plenty of places to learn more about these core ideas and technologies that will help ensure that you have the right data at the right place at the right time - but I want to take a moment to focus on some of the underlying IT infrastructure that enables these smart technologies. The needs of business today have raised the bar, and today’s IT infrastructure must be designed to handle the data volumes, performance as well as operational and regulatory requirements of a modern data center.

Hitachi has historically led the industry in delivering rock-solid mission critical infrastructure, and Hitachi Vantara is carrying this tradition into the future to encompass edge, multi cloud, automation, AI analytics, virtualization, containers and much more.

One place these strengths can be clearly seen is in Hitachi Vantara’s broad portfolio of converged and hyperconverged infrastructure that offer fast time to production and the highest reliability, availability, efficiency and security.

In this blog I want to drill down and take a quick look at what’s new in Hitachi’s converged infrastructure platform – the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI (UCP CI).

The watchword for UCP CI is “flexibility”. UCP CI is a platform that can be configured to support any workload, at any scale, leveraging all of Hitachi’s latest innovations in storage, servers and intelligent data operations – integrated with our partners’ industry leading networking solutions.

What’s unique about UCP CI is that these capabilities are not merely alternatives but can be combined within a single system managed by a single comprehensive management interface, UCP Advisor. This is the power of “and”.

A picture containing cup, table  Description automatically generated  Storage: SAN and vSAN
The latest release of UCP CI takes advantage all the ground-breaking advances and world leading performance just announced in the new VSP 5000 Series storage arrays, but it can also integrate vSAN nodes which support the latest high capacity NVMe drives. Either way you get increased capacity and performance.

A picture containing object  Description automatically generated  Compute: Scale up and Scale out
The compute layer of UCP CI is powered by Hitachi Advanced Servers. DS120, DS220 and DS240 servers support scale out architectures such as private and hybrid cloud. DS225 servers add GPU performance for AI and analytic acceleration. The modular DS7000 series supports scale-up and scale-out architectures for business applications such as SAP HANA and Oracle database.

With this release, all our servers have been upgraded to provide higher performance, capacity and increased VM density with support for the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (aka Cascade Lake), as well as Intel’s Optane DC persistent memory DIMMs.

  Application Environments: Virtualization and Containers
Many organizations today face the tough challenge of supporting both traditional legacy applications which have been the backbone of IT for years, as well as modern cloud native DevOps and hybrid cloud apps. UCP CI bridges the gap by supporting both virtualized VMware environments and bare metal and containers. (One of the critical enablers for container support - persistent storage – is a capability which underpined several of the solution demonstrations featured at NEXT 2019.)

 Networking: Performance and Choice
From its inception, UCP CI has offered tight integration with networking products from Cisco and Brocade – allowing seamless integrated management with storage and servers. With this release we are expanding customer choice and making the benefits of UCP CI available to a broader range of organizations by adding support for Arista network switches.

 Management: Innovation and Simplification
A key part of any UCP CI solution is the integrated management and intelligent AI operations enabled by UCP Advisor and our Ops Center portfolio of products.

We have added management support for all the new hardware and capabilities described above, with an updated UI and even stronger security. Intelligent AI operations and automation make management of your UCP CI solution more secure, error free and simple to configure.


With so much that’s new this fall it’s a great time to consider converged infrastructure from Hitachi. Why not join us and enjoy the benefits of innovation and flexibility!

To learn more about advances in Hitachi’s converged and hyperconverged portfolio, follow these links:

UCP HC (with HCP)
UCP RS
UCP Advisor
Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for CI
Ops Center Administrator

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04-26-2022 13:06

Very nicely written