Hitachi Vantara has long been known as a major player for top-end storage kit, but it is expanding its line-up of all-flash storage devices aimed at mid-sized organisations.

Last year Hitachi Vantara reworked its high-end Virtual Storage Platform and earlier this year it announced the E990 – an all-flash storage array aimed at mid-sized organisations. Today the mid-market E Series line-up gets two new 2U models – the VSP E590 and the E790. The key difference is that these devices come with many of the features more commonly seen with top drawer storage systems.

Data Storage a Crucial Issue

Data storage remains a crucial issue for enterprise IT because data volumes are growing twice as fast as technology budgets. Figures from 451 Research showed average IT budgets increasing by ten per cent year-on-year while data volume is increasing by 19 per cent a year. Matching those competing pressures is a big challenge for IT directors.

But it is not just about increasing volume of data. There are also increasing demands to make that data available to more and more applications across the business as Artificial Intelligence and business intelligence systems play an ever larger role in corporate decision making. Digital transformation means making better use of business data to speed innovation and improve strategic decisions.

While this leads to pressure on costs just as important is ensuring that storage kit is easy to use and manage and that means making sure as many of the day-to-day tasks as possible are fully automated. Hitachi E Series runs with Hitachi Ops Center management software as well as using the Artificial Intelligence powered Advanced Data Reduction to further improve capacity and make the most of limited resources. This gives smaller organisations exactly the same tool set that bigger data centres get to use. The E590 and E790 also come with integrated data protection and copy data management to further simply infrastructure management.

Bobby Soni, president of Digital Infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara said: “Hitachi Vantara has long been the gold standard for high-performance data storage but today we are raising the bar for midmarket storage too. We are enabling all the industry leading capabilities and intelligent software that have fueled the success of the VSP 5000 down market to our new E-series midmarket products, with aggressive price points and enhanced ease of use.”

The Importance of Automation

451Research’s Market Insight report took note of the importance of automation and the increasing trickle down of features and capabilities from high-end kit to mid-range equipment. This automation is not only about saving time and money but also reducing errors, offering greater availability and accelerating agility and innovation. While AI-powered insights into infrastructure performance are all well and good what business really needs is systems which can automatically act on this insight to improve system performance without requiring frequent staff intervention.

For companies who want to completely avoid the headache of managing hardware Hitachi Vantara is also launching ‘storage as a service’ which is available via partners. Hitachi Virtual Storage as a Service provides enterprise class cloud storage for medium-sized companies with predictable storage needs which want a fully managed, hassle-free storage service. You only pay for what you use and a simple self-service console makes it easy to instantly adapt infrastructure to changing workloads. It promises 99.99 per cent uptime and sub-milisecond response times.

Hardware can be kept on-premises or co-located according to customer preference.

EverFlex Offers Simplified Pricing and Payment

Even for organisations not opting for a fully-managed service Hitachi Vantara has simplified its pricing and payment schemes. Now called EverFlex it offers organisations a range of options from consumption-based pricing, leasing or outright purchase of kit alongside its managed service, remote management and cloud-based services.

The company is also launching HNAS 5000 – a family of network attached storage devices to allow file data to be stored on the same Hitachi Vantara infrastructure. This offers users the improved productivity and ease of management of a single storage infrastructure and the ability to further cut costs by shifting file data to any remote target like the public cloud based on a set of rules and policies.

Hitachi Vantara’s promise is that whether you are in the market for a single array or looking to fill up a much larger environment they have the hardware, and just as importantly management software, to solve to meet your unique needs now and be ready to evolve for whatever comes next.

You can read more about this launch and get a taste for Hitachi Vantara’s range of innovative solutions by registering for @AdVantage 2020 here, a fantastic opportunity to watch a range of on-demand presentations that will inspire your digital transformation journey.

In addition, to read 451 Research’s take on this new storage initiative, just click here.