Hitachi Vantara storage platform targets midsize enterprises

Hitachi Vantara has introduced Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E990, the company’s new storage platform aimed at bringing large enterprise functions to midsize enterprise customers.

The E990 offers an NVMe-based, all-flash option with Hitachi’s 100% data availability guarantee. It comes with Hitachi’s Storage Virtualization Operating System RF (SVOS RF) – the operating system used across its entire storage product line – so customers can manage and replicate their data between SVOS RF systems and avoid creating silos of data.

The E990 fits in between the high-end VSP 5000 product line and midrange E900, but it has all the enterprise capabilities of the VSP 5000. It comes in a 4U design with capacity for up to 24 NVMe SSDs, and it has a max raw internal capacity of 1.44PB when configured with 15TB of NVMe SSDs.

In addition to its massive capacity, the E990 offers 5.79M IOPS of performance, allowing for massive consolidation of workloads, and Hitachi promises response times as low as 64 microseconds.

The E990 is also powered by Hitachi’s Ops Center, an artificial intelligence-driven management program that enables simplified storage provisioning for AI, machine learning (ML) and containerized applications.

Hitachi claims the E990 with Hitachi Ops Center delivers 4:1 data de-duplication that’s guaranteed to free up 75% of storage capacity. Ops Center’s AI-enhanced management can streamline storage delivery by up to 90% for demanding applications and reduce manual storage provisioning tasks by up to 70%, the company says.

Hitachi is also getting into the pay-per-use sales model that other OEMs have embraced with a new program called EverFlex. It provides consumption-based pricing models for the entire Hitachi Vantara portfolio, ranging from basic utility pricing to custom outcome-based services to Storage-as-a-Service.

By enabling customers to pay only for what they use and align technology spending with business use, Hitachi claims customers can reduce costs by up to 20% and eliminate the need to pay for reserve capacity.

Hitachi is introducing EverFlex with the E990 and plans to expand it to other products as well.