Hitachi Data Systems: Discover and Analyze Data for Competitive Advantage

With the movement of big data and advanced analytics from their traditional uses in university research to commercial businesses, high-performance computing (HPC) systems have now become ubiquitous. Additionally, as data recording is moving from traditional approaches on magnetic media to in-memory computing, which closely mirrors traditional HPC application processing. These movements have led to new requirements for data protection, cost-efficient infrastructures, east-west networks (server to server traffic that closely mirrors HPC fabrics) and reduced management workloads for administrators. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), headquartered in California, uses HPC ideas such as building converged stacks which blend application, OS, VM, compute, network fabric and storage into a single package with a consistent management interface. “These systems address many of the concerns and pain points for users in the market. The management interface masks much of the complexity for managing single atomic elements and makes it simple to set up data protection schemes on a single site or multiple sites,” said Michael Hay, Vice President, Chief Engineer, Hitachi Data Systems.

HDS was founded as a global provider of storage solutions for commercial uses. Through the years, the company’s portfolio has expanded through compute and novel software capabilities for traditional commercial workloads to include the era of advanced analytics. “For the last several years in particular, we have focused on converged systems that support these HPC-like infrastructure-hungry applications,” said Hay. “Ultimately our aim is to build solutions for infrastructure, content and analytics for our vision of Social Innovation. Our goal for IT infrastructure and software platforms is to enable complex workloads and simulations for Social Innovation.” To achieve this, HDS combines sophisticated algorithms with advanced data processing infrastructures in centralized data centers.

The growth of HDS from basic storage supplier to complete systems supplier is best illustrated though one of the company’s flagship products, Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP).