Hitachi Vantara has partnered with Broadcom to produce an updated Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS, powered by the newly launched VMware Cloud Foundation v9 software, unveiled at VMware Explore 2024.
Update: Hitachi Vantara query answers added. 30 August 2024
The Unified Compute Platform RS (UCP Rack Scale) relies on Hitachi’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) arrays and Cisco Nexus switches. UCP RS is turnkey infrastructure with lifecycle management features and a pay-per-use consumption model. It runs traditional VMs and containers, and is suited for on-premises AI workloads. Hitachi Vantara claims its design reduces greenhouse gas emissions and energy costs, stating that the inclusion of VSP One arrays reduces CO2 emissions by up to 96 percent and datacenter storage footprint by up to 35 percent.
Paul Turner, VP for products in Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation Division, said in a statement: “This not only addresses the current challenges of data management and infrastructure modernization, but also aligns with organizations’ sustainability goals, making it an essential tool for businesses looking to thrive in the era of generative AI and beyond.”
UCP RS supports both vSAN (server-based virtualized storage) and external (VSP One) storage, and the pair say it offers 100 percent data availability. The infrastructure and hardware firmware lifecycle automation comes through Hitachi’s UCP Advisor and SDDC Manager.
Hitachi Vantara says its new UCP RS has “a particular focus on healthcare IT” as “the healthcare sector is experiencing exponential growth in data volume, velocity, and variety.”
We asked the company some questions about this new UCP RS;
Blocks & Files: Does the “RS” mean Rack Scale?
Hitachi Vantara: Yes, but we do not expand RS in the official brand.
Blocks & Files: Is it true that The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS combines compute, storage, and networking resources into a single, pre-configured, and optimized system that can be rapidly deployed and easily managed, and can be scaled by adding additional racks as needed?
Hitachi Vantara: Yes, it’s a co-engineered turnkey solution that brings together all data center components and delivers advanced automation and enterprise grade scale, performance, and availability. The solution can be scaled up to eight racks per system.
Blocks & Files: Does it use servers supplied by Cisco Systems; Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) servers?
Hitachi Vantara:: No. We have a separate converged infrastructure offering Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure that is rapidly growing in adoption too.
Blocks & Files: Where does the compute and networking come from? Which suppliers?
Hitachi Vantara: Hitachi branded DS and HA series servers and networking switches are from Cisco, or Brocade (Broadcom) FC-SAN.
Blocks & Files: Isn’t this just a Hitachi version of the Dell EMC-Cisco Vblock?
Hitachi Vantara: Hitachi’s UCP RS, a co-engineered integrated solution, provides deep integration between UCP Advisor and VCF Operations (SDDC Manager) for a unified management experience for day0-2 cloud operations including provisioning, configuration, lifecycle management, monitoring, auditing, troubleshooting, etc. Network management and firmware upgrades are reliably managed by UCP Advisor. UCP Advisor delivers an advanced multi-tenancy framework that aligns well with workload domains with VMware Cloud Foundation. The biggest source of differentiation is the most scalable, resilient Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) arrays for enterprise private and hybrid cloud environments such as 100% data availability guarantee, and 3-DC fail-safe architecture, enabling multi-failure domains that match or exceed the availability offered by public cloud regions.
Blocks & Files: Can you elaborate how UCP-RS might address health’s data challenges?
HV: Yes, data sovereignty issues make health care providers store data on-premises.
VCF v9
Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 features:
- Unified Operations and Automation with a self-service cloud portal for provisioning services, reducing the total number of management consoles from more than a dozen to just a single console each for operations and automation. New integrated workflows are intended to simplify the transition between operations and automation tasks, and better insights and analytics are designed to enable more proactive management.
- Expanded VCF Import reduces the complexity and downtime associated with manual migrations of existing environments into VCF. It will have the ability to import VMware’s NSX, vDefend, Avi Load Balancer, and more complex storage topologies into existing VCF environments, and use and integrate older versions of existing infrastructure. A new UI will simplify management and deployment.
- Memory Tiering with NVMe to enhance data-intensive applications, such as AI, databases and real-time analytics by reducing latency and accelerating data throughput, which is good for training and inference tasks and helps with storage cost-efficiency.
- Integrated VCF Multi-Tenancy previously provided separately by VMware Cloud Director.
- Native VPC Deployment to simplify networking by enabling users to access self-service isolated connectivity without VLAN complexities and enable non-disruptive integration with existing networks.
- Accelerated Adoption of VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia for deploying, managing, and scaling AI-driven applications securely and efficiently on VCF-based private clouds with vGPU profile visibility, GPU reservations, data indexing and retrieval service, and an AI agent builder service.
- Unified VCF Security Management with a centralized information hub and a new security view. Configuration drift detection will correlate and proactively notify IT of inconsistencies in system configurations across an entire VCF fleet.
- Native vSAN-to-vSAN Data Protection with Deep Snapshots: vSAN remote snapshot replication will have a deep history of immutable snapshots, reduce downtime with enterprise-grade DR orchestration, and simplify the management experience with a unified appliance. It supports vSAN disaggregated storage for increased scalability and storage efficiency. Customers can use the immutable vSAN snapshots to recover from ransomware attacks with an on-premises Isolated Recovery Environment, complementing the existing cloud-based ransomware recovery offering.
- Advancing Cyber Threat Prevention: vDefend will expand to deliver new features such as distributed firewall rule impact analysis to help simplify micro-segmentation security policy operations; distributed intrusion detection and prevention (IDPS) enhancements to support large, dense and multi-instance VCF environments; rapid threat assessment to help harden security posture by enabling threat profiling of VCF environments; and on-premises malware prevention for regulated organizations that require air-gapped deployment of VCF. Project Cypress will deliver GenAI-based intelligent assistance to help IT security teams proactively triage sophisticated threat campaigns and recommend remediation options.
Broadcom has also launched VMware Tanzu Platform 10 and Tanzu AI Solutions. Purnima Padmanabhan, Broadcom’s Tanzu division GM, said in a statement: “Now, with Tanzu Platform’s built-in AI development framework, developers can build high-performing, intelligent apps, regardless of their experience level or knowledge of Python. Tanzu AI Solutions help development teams go from dabbling in the sandbox to deploying enterprise-ready intelligent applications to production with confidence.”
Tanzu Platform 10 automates both application and platform management tasks such as patching vulnerabilities, performing rolling upgrades, and enforcing policies with broad visibility and AI-powered insights. Developers can use simple operations to automate secure container builds, bind services to apps, deploy code with a single command, and easily scale applications.
More VCF v9 details can be found here.
