Hitachi Vantara makes play at midsized market with latest offerings

Hitachi Vantara has released new offerings designed to support the data infrastructure needs of midsized enterprises.

More specifically, the company has announced the expansion of its E Series line of high performance NVMe all-flash arrays, additions to the HNAS family of NAS solutions, and introduced the Hitachi Virtual Storage as a Service aimed at midsized enterprises.

The company also unveiled new initiatives designed to enable channel partners to help midsized enterprise customers accelerate into a new era of digital business platforms and ecosystems, the company states.

A closer look at the new offerings

Hitachi Vantara has introduced two new offerings to establish itself as the preferred midrange portfolio provider.

The company is expanding the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E Series line with the addition of VSP E590 and E790, new all NVMe midrange all-flash models.

This brings enterprise-class features and benefits to customers of all sizes whose businesses are outpacing their existing infrastructure and need support for modern business processes like DevOps.

The new E series features intelligent embedded management capability designed to simplify all aspects of the E series from rapid installation to automated provisioning and intelligent performance management, top priorities for smaller IT teams.

For customers planning larger deployments, and seeking greater end-to-end analytics, workflow orchestration, and automation, the VSP E Series systems are also compatible with Hitachi's enterprise-grade management software, Hitachi Ops Center.

VSP E590 and E790 are 2U platforms that enable best-in-class performance with integrated data protection and copy data management capabilities to protect and simplify the day-to-day management of data.

They leverage the same SVOS RF operating system as the VSP 5000 Series for guaranteed data reduction and efficiency.

AI-powered Advanced Data Reduction (ADR) in the Hitachi VSP E Series portfolio drives capacity efficiencies so midrange customers can make the most of limited space, the company states.

Available through partners, Hitachi Virtual Storage as a Service provides enterprise-class cloud storage services specifically designed for midmarket needs.

It is tailored for medium businesses with predictable storage services, delivered as a managed service either on-premises or co-located.

With the flexibility of a consumption-based pricing model, it provides predictable rates for budgeting and a self-service console for agility to adapt to changing infrastructure needs.

Additional benefits include:

• 99.99% uptime service level with fast sub-millisecond response time.
• Simplicity for partners to manage and easy for customers to subscribe while providing enterprise performance at competitive rates.
• Enterprise-class service availability and performance allow customers to harness cloud economics without relinquishing control.
• Agile self-service console for oversight and planning.
• 'Faster-to-market' capabilities with an elastic and accelerated storage infrastructure.

Hitachi Vantara also introduced the HNAS 5000 family, a storage solution for distributed enterprise and data center application workloads which allows customers to consolidate file data on the same Hitachi Vantara infrastructure they already trust. It offers:

• Increased productivity of a shared storage infrastructure. Customers can add files to any VSP system to consolidate a wide range of workloads.
• Reduced expenses by offloading file data based on rules and policies to any type of remote target including public cloud.

The important role of partners 

As Hitachi Vantara looks to intensify its focus around the expansive midmarket segment with its new tailor-made VSP E Series arrays and partner-delivered Hitachi Virtual Storage as a Service offering, the company's partner ecosystem will be critical.

They can help provide scale, identify opportunities, extend reach and deliver the solutions that will address customer pain points, the company states.

To ensure that registered partners are equipped to accelerate penetration of this space with these new offerings, Hitachi Vantara offers a range of tools and enablement resources, including:

• A dynamic pricing tool that includes deal pricing guidance and automated deal approval workflows.
• Hitachi Guru, a midrange storage recommendation tool.
• Stackable incentives.
• Simplified training, sandbox and online labs to expand partner knowledge and accelerate sales opportunities.
• Pre-built, customisable marketing campaign assets in the Partner Marketing Hub.

Hitachi Vantara's why 

With data volumes growing nearly twice as fast as IT budgets (19% Y/Y vs. 10% Y/Y), a critical pain point is storing and making that data accessible for customers and their applications, the company states.

With fewer IT staff and resources, midsize customers are eager for reliable solutions that can reduce their storage costs and drive efficiencies.

Hitachi Vantara's solutions are designed to address the most important needs of midmarket buyers.

Hitachi Vantara president of digital infrastructure Bobby Soni says, "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.

"With our new as-a-Service offering, we're further easing the burden of managing infrastructure so customers can focus on what matters most - managing their business.

Hitachi Vantara global vice president of strategic partners and alliances, Kimberly King, says, "Hitachi Vantara and our partners are excited to extend these powerful new enterprise-class offerings to midsized organisations to empower them to accelerate their transformation and achieve their business objectives - all at an attractive price point.