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What is Hitachi Vantara?

By Alexander S. Gillis

Hitachi Vantara is a data storage systems provider headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. Previously known as Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hitachi Vantara is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. Hitachi Vantara focuses on helping organizations manage, store and analyze their data.

Hitachi Vantara offers data infrastructure and hybrid cloud services for enterprises and midsize organizations. The vendor's offerings focus on the following areas:

• Artificial intelligence (AI).
• Big data.
• Converged infrastructure.
• Cloud infrastructure.
• Data protection.
• Enterprise data storage.
• IT knowledge and analytics.
• Software for machine learning.
• Social collaboration.
• Cloud and storage management.

Hitachi Vantara products

Hitachi Vantara product offerings are organized into four distinct categories: storage platforms, data management, integrated systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The following is a sampling of its tools.

Storage platforms

Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) One is an enterprise-level tool for unified storage, management and data analysis. It's used as a unified data plane for structured and unstructured data, as well as for block, file and object storage. It runs on-premises or in the public cloud.

Data management

OpsCenter is a centralized platform for managing, automating and protecting data infrastructure. It's designed to enable users to manage and protect their Hitachi storage infrastructure efficiently.

Integrated systems

Hitachi IQ is designed to provide insights from data and support the deployment of AI applications. It's also designed to integrate into existing IT ecosystems and enable improved decision-making and more efficient data operations.

IaaS

EverFlex enables organizations to access and manage their IT infrastructure in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. EverFlex is based on a pay-per-use payment method, designed to be scalable and efficient.

Hitachi Vantara also offers several other storage products, including those for the internet of things (IoT), big data analytics, data protection, cloud storage and converged systems.

• The Hitachi VSP F Series uses Hitachi's Storage Virtualization Operating System to deliver high-speed data transfers. The VSP F Series is an all-flash platform that includes quality-of-service functionality, data replication and deduplication. The VSP G series is Hitachi Vantara's hybrid flash platform.
• The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series is a hyperconverged storage platform. This scale-out, enterprise-ready platform is designed to run virtual and containerized applications using VMware vSphere and vSAN. The CI Series is the Converged edition of the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform.
• The Lumada software platform is designed for IoT. It can run on a private or public cloud, as well as locally on a user's system. Lumada aims to facilitate IoT services to remote facilities, as well as reduce costs and increase availability from a single database.
• Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is designed for big data. Users can access reports and analytics remotely and process and consume the data anywhere. Pentaho supports Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL data stores and analytic databases. The Lumada IoT platform uses Pentaho data orchestration, visualization and analytics software.
• The Hitachi Data Protection Suite is powered by Commvault and can automatically migrate data to secondary storage while maintaining transparent user access. The Data Protection Suite integrates data backup and recovery, and includes point-in-time replication, archiving and storage resource management under one user interface.
• Hitachi Content Intelligence can catalog, transform and augment data to help identify its value. As part of the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), it's designed to make relevant data more accessible, as well as keep it secure and easy to manage.
• HCP granularly manages data and supports mixed workloads using object storage in the private, public and hybrid cloud. HCP can be used on large amounts of unstructured data and uses metadata for analysis and search.
• Hitachi NAS (Network Attached Storage) platform is a file-based storage gateway that's optimized for Microsoft, Oracle and VMware data center workloads.

Hitachi company history

Hitachi Vantara was founded in 1989 when Hitachi Ltd. and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) acquired National Advanced Systems from National Semiconductor. The following are other significant events in the company's history:

1999. Hitachi bought EDS and HDS became a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi.

2000. HDS reorganized, moving its focus from mainframes to spotlight storage systems. That same year, HDS announced its first storage-based product, the Freedom Storage Lightning 9900.

2001. HDS announced the Thunder 9200, a midrange modular storage system. This positioned the company as a competitive contender in the data storage market.

2007. HDS acquired object storage startup Archivas. Before the acquisition, HDS resold Archivas software as part of the Hitachi Content Archive Platform -- the forerunner to HCP.

2011. HDS purchased NAS vendor BlueArc for $600 million. Before the acquisition, HDS sold BlueArc storage as Hitachi NAS and still sells the platform.

2012. HDS acquired Shoden Data Systems, a data storage and protection technology provider. HDS also acquired California-based Cofio Software, a provider of unified data protection.

2014. HDS acquired Sepaton, a data deduplication vendor in Marlborough, Mass.

2015. HDS purchased big data analytics and IoT platform vendor Pentaho. Pentaho played a key role in Hitachi Vantara's Social Innovation business, emphasizing the use of IT innovation to resolve global societal issues in areas such as agriculture, medicine and analytics. HDS also acquired Oxya, a New Jersey-based SAP HANA service provider.

2017. Hitachi Vantara -- a company that combines the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho -- was formed.

2019. The integration of Hitachi Vantara Corp. and Hitachi Consulting Corp. enabled the companies to focus on the continued growth of Hitachi's Lumada-based software. In January 2020, the integrated companies began to operate under the name Hitachi Vantara.

2024. Another spinoff company, Hitachi Digital Services, was announced. Hitachi Digital Services focuses on creating an operating model for cloud, data, IoT and managed services. It also promotes its integrated generative AI technology to improve end-to-end digital transformations. The company is positioned alongside Hitachi Digital and Hitachi Vantara.

AI has become more prevalent over the past few years. Learn more about the storage industry's shift toward AI using Hitachi Vantara as an example.