By Nimish Vora, Head, Cloud Foundation Business Development, VMware and Shane Gibson, Business Applications and Virtualization Manager, Hitachi Vantara
Working together, technology leaders Hitachi Vantara and VMware can integrate your existing IT systems and critical data with advanced cloud technology — leading to a cloud launch in days, not months
Today, virtually every business is exploring the significant benefits of cloud computing to accelerate daily work processes, improve data access and increase security — while at the same time minimizing capital investments. Many businesses, however, are reluctant to pursue a cloud approach because their organizations are supported by a heterogeneous set of diverse IT resources that have grown organically over time. They fear the huge investments required to update nearly all their technology systems in preparation for a cloud launch.
For these companies, there is good news.
Hitachi Vantara and VMware — two acknowledged technology leaders — have partnered to create one of the industry’s fastest and most cost-effective cloud strategies. By leveraging its Unified Compute Platform (UCP), Hitachi “cloudifies” customers’ existing IT resources, tightly integrating them and configuring the resulting technology architecture for a successful cloud launch. Then VMware steps in, providing its industry-leading VMware Cloud Foundation to distribute workloads, applications and data across a hybrid public-private cloud, quickly and securely.
This partnership approach leads to cloud launches within days, not months — which means customers can begin enjoying the benefits, and earning a return on investment, much faster.
Hitachi and VMware: Reliability Meets Agility
Hitachi applies its deep expertise in data and related technologies to help customers realize a reliable, converged infrastructure with unmatched reliability, flexibility, automation and performance.
While many technology providers recommend a “rip and replace” strategy, in which older systems are discarded, Hitachi recognizes the value of customers’ existing IT investments. Instead of striving to build a new, costly, homogeneous environment, Hitachi tightly integrates companies’ heterogeneous legacy systems at a much lower investment. With technology resources unified, the scalability of those resources is amplified — and they are ready for seamless integration with VMware’s cloud solution.
VMware matches the reliability and tight integration of Hitachi’s technology architecture with the agility and cost-effectiveness of hybrid cloud computing.
VMware’s Cloud Foundation approach delivers service availability and business continuity via a closely aligned configuration of public and private clouds, as well as remote and local storage. Wherever and whenever information or applications are needed, VMware’s agile delivery model ensures they are available.
The industry leader in virtualization, VMware recognizes that today’s businesses can benefit from using a hybrid cloud, while also leveraging a common infrastructure and consistent operational model. This ensures that clients’ on- and off-premises data centers are fully compatible, stretched and distributed — maximizing asset availability, efficiency and utilization.
A World of Benefits
Via the Hitachi-VMware partnership, companies can align their data and IT resources and begin leveraging the power of a cloud computing strategy, in just days — compared to the months typically involved in a cloud deployment. As companies enjoy these and other benefits, they can earn value faster — and quickly begin achieving a return on investment:
- Lower total cost of ownership. Hitachi’s technology convergence services, combined with VMware’s flexible hybrid cloud approach, eliminate the need for new capital investments. System maintenance and technology upgrade costs — along with the associated manual labor — are also avoided, thanks to VMware’s automated life-cycle management services.
- Uncompromising security. An expert in cybersecurity, VMware ensures resources distributed in the cloud are safe against hackers, ransomware and other cyber threats. With the number of attacks growing daily, companies can depend on VMware to secure their most critical data assets.
- “Plug and play” installation. No matter how complex each customer’s existing technology systems, Hitachi delivers a fully integrated architecture that’s racked, stacked, cabled and ready to plug into the VMware Cloud Foundation. Patches are applied automatically as part of Lifecycle Management (LCM) feature of Cloud Foundation.
Committed to Ongoing Innovation
Longtime strategic partners, Hitachi and VMware are dedicated to supporting ongoing technology and service innovations for their shared customers.
“Increasingly, organizations are transitioning from dedicated, separate compute, networking and storage systems to converged and hyper-converged infrastructure architectures,” stated Sasan Moaveni, Hitachi’s Global Business Leader, Business Applications and Converged Systems. “In collaboration with VMware, we are pleased to offer new solutions and functionalities to enable customers to meet their business objectives.”
While the Hitachi UCP and VMware Cloud Foundation integration is relatively new, the two businesses are committed to collaborating on additional technology innovations that support their customers’ most pressing challenges.
“For years, VMware and Hitachi have worked together to help customers on their journey to the unified hybrid cloud by developing new, reliable solutions that are simple to use and can support growing business needs,” said Lee Caswell, VMWare’s vice president of storage and availability. “Building on that partnership, we are continuing to work with Hitachi to help our customers accelerate time to value, with infrastructure that can protect workloads and enable reduced operational expenses.”
What’s on the horizon for these two strategic partners? Stay tuned for new innovations in 2019 and beyond. While the past results of this collaboration have been impressive, there is still much more to come.
