Hitachi reduces digitalization headaches with simplified cloud infrastructure

The novel coronavirus has been the biggest driver of innovation this year, with companies fast-tracking their information technology (IT) investments and architecture decisions. “If you had a plan for the next three years,” said Varghese Mathew, Hitachi Vantara’s business development director for the Philippines, “the suggestion is to get out of the three-year plan and make it happen now.”

, the digital infrastructure and solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., recently announced that its Unified Compute Platform (UCP) HC solution is part of a new category of hyperconverged infrastructure options called VMware vSAN Global Partner Appliance. 

These types of technologies enable customers to use private, public, or hybrid cloud strategies based on what their businesses demand, resulting in faster time to market, pay-as-you-go economics, hardened security against data breaches, and greater levels of automation. 

can reduce operational expenses by minimizing an administrator’s time with supplying resources, managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting the data center infrastructure with centralized management. 

is its more agile cousin. HCI is useful for developing and running applications that require a more flexible, more maneuverable, and less expensive infrastructure option but still has the benefits of integrated storage, servers, and networks.

“This solution will reduce spend because complexity is also reduced,” said Mr. Mathew. Hitachi Vantara’s UCP HC collapses the traditional IT operational model into a single layer through VMware’s technology. 

Sudharsan Aravamuthan, Hitachi Vantara’s APAC solution lead for business-critical applications and converged solutions, added that VMware’s cloud foundation solution has an intrinsic security built into every layer of the technology. “The vast majority of security issues are caused by human error,” he said. “Cloud management capabilities include automating manual tasks and system auditing, which significantly increases security.”

Because of their sectors’ needs, the banking and telecommunications industries are leading the pack in the adaptation of these technologies.

“The past eight months have been a petri dish of sorts of digitalization and adapting,” said Walter So, country manager of Philippines, a cloud computing and virtualization software provider. “Before, a single store terminal processed a thousand transactions individually. Now, these one thousand transactions are processed concurrently, giving stress to the current IT infrastructure. Payments are digital [nowadays], so there is a need for seamless integration among enterprises.” 

Added Mr. So: “Enterprises are using this opportunity to clean their houses so when things start to get normal, they’re ready to compete and get back lost revenues. That’s what’s going to happen down the road.” — P. B. Mirasol