Hitachi Vantara unveils AI-enabled data management platform, data analytics solutions

Tokyo-based conglomerate Hitachi has rolled out an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled data centre platform and new data analytics solutions for enterprise operations.

At the NEXT 2019 event held in Las Vegas on Thursday, Hitachi Vantara, the California-headquartered IT services unit of Hitachi,  announced the launch of its Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 Series.

The scalable data storage and infrastructure device is the world’s fastest enterprise-class storage array, said an official statement issued by Hitachi. 

The data centre harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide a data storage foundation for digital business operations. The data platform is compatible with existing workloads as well as new workloads which use multi-cloud environments.

The Hitachi VSP 5000 Series is the world’s fastest NVMe (non-volatile memory express) flash array, the statement said. 

NVMe is a storage protocol which provides accelerated transfer of data between enterprise and client systems.

The Hitachi VSP 5000 Series will be supplemented by the newly launched Hitachi Ops Center management software and the updated Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System.

The data centre solutions also harness technologies such as machine learning (ML) to help optimise a variety of data operations. 

“The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 series is the proving ground for our customers to gain a digital advantage over their competition and achieve better business outcomes,” said Brad Surak, chief product and strategy officer at Hitachi Vantara. 

Hitachi extends Lumada line of services

Hitachi Vantara also announced the expansion of its Lumada platform of data services to facilitate a broader set of data operations. 

The company is diversifying Lumada’s services beyond the internet of things (IoT) to address data challenges for customers in any industry or use-case, said an official statement issued by Hitachi.

Among the new services being offered under the Lumada line are Data Services, Data Lake and Edge Intelligence. 

Lumada Data Services helps customers with data management operations in a variety of technology ecosystems. The solutions allow users to govern and manage data assets across data centre, cloud and edge locations while optimising costs.

The Lumada Data Lake will allow users to place data sets in optimal locations, thereby facilitating enterprises’ accessibility to analytics.

Lastly, Lumada Edge Intelligence will be a line of new software solutions and hardware devices which can undertake operations such as data management, analytics for a variety of digital use cases such as IoT, customer experience, remote operations and in-house processes at branch offices.

The extended Lumada solutions will harness DataOps to address the use cases of both enterprise and industrial customers. 

DataOps is a collaborative data management practice that employs automated approaches to help enterprises reduce the time taken to undertake data analytics.

"Organisations need more automated, policy-based approaches that enable an adaptable and governed data fabric supply chain across their enterprise. With this announcement Hitachi is expanding Lumada to address the modern requirements of collaborative data management for the AI era,”  said Brad Surak, chief product and strategy officer at Hitachi Vantara.

Hitachi had unveiled the Lumada line of solutions in 2017 to primarily address use cases pertaining to IoT data and technologies. The company said that it is developing Lumada to serve as a data management and application platform for all industries. 

In September 2019, Hitachi Vantara launched Lumada Manufacturing Insights, an industrial IoT solution targeted at the manufacturing industry. The company had said at the time that the Lumada line of solutions will set the digital foundation for manufacturing 4.0, a set of automated factory practices harnessing frontier technologies.

Last year, TechCircle was the first to report that industrial IoT startup Flutura Decision Sciences and Analytics raised around $1 million in a round of funding from an arm of Hitachi. The startup’s flagship product Cerebra is a machine analytics platform that facilitates extraction and analysis of machine-embedded data.