Hitachi Vantara: VSP One leads revamped storage portfolio
In this storage supplier profile, we look at Hitachi Vantara, which is a small part of a very big organisation.
Since we last looked at Hitachi Vantara, its storage portfolio has undergone something of a revamp, based around its VSP One family that offers block, file and object storage – with performance profiles that range from NVMe flash to HDD capacity – available across on-premise, cloud and even mainframe environments.
It can provide all this via as-a-service models of procurement, and also offers full-stack IT including compute and – via partnerships – networking, too – and with containerisation for cloud-native deployments.
Hitachi Vantara is the storage, data and analytics division of the giant Hitachi group, which as a corporation is ranked 196th in the Forbes Global 500 as of last year. In recent times, Hitachi has declined in this ranking. It was at 38th in 2012, 78th in 2014 and 106th in 2020.
Formed out of the Hitachi Data Systems storage group, Vantara was created in 2017 upon a merger with the group’s Pentaho business intelligence operation and the Hitachi Insight Group (IT services and consulting).
Hitachi Vantara is a small part of the parent Hitachi corporation, whose consolidated revenues for fiscal year 2020 were $70.72bn, with subsidiaries numbered in the hundreds and approximately just under 270,000 employees worldwide in 2024.
Vantara was formed in 2017 to deliver digital systems. Its name was chosen for being “suggestive”, according to CEO Brian Householder in 2017, and is meant to evoke “advantage”, a “vantage point” and “virtualisation”.
How does Hitachi Vantara rank against other storage players?
In Hitachi’s results for 2023, Digital Systems & Services revenues were 2,599 billion yen ($18.4bn) and a rise of 4% year-on-year.
However, Vantara storage appears to be a relatively small part of Digital Systems & Services.
IDC reckoned the company’s external storage system revenues at $1.55bn and a market share of 4.9%. That was a small increase on 2022, in which it had storage array revenue and share of $1.42bn and 4.4%.
That puts Hitachi Vantara seventh in the IDC ranking of storage array players, level with IBM, but only “others” below them.
What are Hitachi Vantara’s key storage products?
Hitachi Vantara’s flagship storage platform is Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) One. VSP One – launched in late 2024 – offers a single data fabric across on-premise and cloud with all-QLC and object storage products added at that time.
Top of the line in block storage is the VSP 5000 series, which comes as the all-flash 5200 and 5600, with an H-suffix variant to each that indicates the possibility of spinning disk HDD capacity.
Per node, each offer 65,280 LUNs at 256TB per LUN and maximum 1,024 snapshots per LUN. All of them allow for Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Ficon mainframe connectivity.
The 5200 offers capacity up to just below 300PB. NVMe SCM (storage class memory) can be fitted. The ratio of NVMe flash to SAS HDDs possible is about 1:8, with the latter going up to drive sizes of 18TB.
The 5600 model gains a much higher drive and port count. Throughput is also very much improved over the 5200 (312GBps vs 52GBps).
VSP block storage arrays run a common operating system, Storage Virtualization OS (SVOS).
The VSP One Block range is aimed at the midrange, and comes in a 2U form factor with options for TLC and QLC flash storage capacity. It can scale per appliance from 32TB effective to 1.8PB and to 65 nodes. It also runs SVOS – that can manage other suppliers’ arrays – and can run file and S3 object, too.
Vantara’s E series are the E590 and E790 – it seems to have lost the E1090 since we last surveyed the company. These also scale to PBs but lack the mainframe access of the 5000s. They also retain spinning disk HDD capacity.
VSP One SDS is a software-defined platform aimed at “distributed block applications” that potentially run to PB scale. It runs on third-party hardware and in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. A key idea is that customers have a great deal of flexibility in how they deploy it. SVOS allows for data flow across applications and locations, with Kubernetes APIs to allow containerised applications.
Hitachi Vantara’s file storage offer comes in the form of VSP One File series, in which models are given number suffixes, namely 32, 34 and 38.
VSP One File 32 is aimed at entry-level and cost-sensitive deployments, while the 34 aims at customers that want all-flash – presumably the 32 uses HDDs – and the 38 is built for all-out performance. Each model is also distinguished by connectivity options – more Ethernet bandwidth, Fibre Channel choices and raw bandwidth – and node count (from 20 to 80). VSP One File arrays also have some S3 object storage capability, but only as a tier for connection to the cloud.
Object storage is served by VSP One Object, providing S3 native storage that can scale from a few TB to 150TB per node in a minimum eight-node cluster. It’s aimed at data lake and data warehouse, backup repository and AI/ML use cases.
Hitachi Content Platform is the company’s unstructured data platform. It comes as a physical or virtual appliance or as storage software, can scale to exabytes and is available as hybrid (with HDDs and flash, for example) and all-flash. Capacity can be extended from on-premise to the three major clouds – AWS, Azure and GCP – or any S3-compatible cloud.
Hyper-converged infrastructure comes in the form of hardware appliances in its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform, which can be all-flash, all-NVMe flash and GPU-equipped. UCP uses VMware vSphere as its hypervisor, with node capacity that can go from a few TB to the low 100-plus TB range with a maximum of 64 nodes.
What markets and workloads does Hitachi Vantara target?
Hitachi Vantara storage can deal with workloads that range from entry-level and SME storage to the most demanding enterprise workloads that include transactional processing and AI.
In 2024, Hitachi launched its iQ portfolio that combines Nvidia technologies with Hitachi Vantara storage – in particular Hitachi Content Platform and file storage – and aims to provide reference architectures for AI use cases.
Pentaho is a key plank of the Vantara brand. It provides AI-based data cataloguing across multiple on-premise and cloud data stores, data lakes, and so on. It allows for metadata tagging, as well as pipeline and workflow tools including ingest and cleanse, with access controls and data protection, plus migration to data warehouses.
The company claims 85% of Fortune 500 companies are Hitachi Vantara customers.
How does the cloud fit Hitachi Vantara strategy?
Hitachi Vantara put hybrid and multi-cloud operations at the heart of its plans when it launched VSP One.
Using its SVOS storage operating system, it aims to make data available to customers across multiple datacentres and public cloud providers.
What is the Hitachi Vantara container strategy?
Hitachi Storage Plug-in for Containers provides integration between Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) and container orchestrators such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. It addresses the complexities of storage management for containers for stateful applications. These include provisioning and enabling persistent storage for containers, as well as advanced storage features and data protection.
The company’s Hitachi EverFlex service (see below) also provides containers as a service to provide central management of compute, storage, security and Kubernetes management.
Hitachi’s initial foray into container storage was Hitachi Kubernetes Service, which was built out of IP belonging to Containership in 2019, using CSI drivers to manage persistent volumes directly on Kubernetes nodes.
What consumption models of purchasing does Hitachi Vantara offer?
Hitachi Vantara’s EverFlex infrastructure as a service allows customers to take advantage of flexible capacity and pay-per-use consumption that can range from self-managed to fully managed by a third party across the full IT stack, which can be on-premise or hybrid cloud.
Everflex Consumption Level allows customers to scale up and down within a pre-agreed capacity range. Meanwhile, Foundation Level adds advanced management, observability and control over the infrastructure.
Additional services at Foundation Level include integration capabilities aimed at existing heterogenous environments, provision of resources to plug skills gaps or management by Hitachi Vantara, all based on SLAs.
Options that include third-party providers, such as Cisco for networking, are also offered.
The company also offers Hitachi EverFlex Data Protection as a Service, which is based on VSP One infrastructure.
Service management works through the cloud-based Hitachi Services Manager portal, with storage capacities that start at 50TB and go up to petabytes. Monthly billing consists of a committed amount and a flexible fee that covers excess usage costs.
