Hitachi Vantara and Hammerspace have made a deal to combine multi-source data orchestration facilities from Hammerspace with Hitachi Vantara’s enterprise-level file and block storage products, targeting data provision for GenAI workloads.
Hitachi Vantara is a long-standing supplier of block, file, and object storage to large and medium enterprises. It is unifying its portfolio under a Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) One concept with recent VSP One block and object appliances as part of this initiative. The company has also introduced its IQ product with NVIDIA-specific GPU server targets, like BasePOD, integrated with Hitachi Vantara storage systems. This includes HCFS, rebranded WekaFS file system software (Weka Data Platform), a POSIX-compliant parallel file system integrated with Hitachi Vantara’s object storage.
Integration with Hammerspace’s Global Data Platform adds another dimension to this storage portfolio.
Kimberly King, SVP of strategic partners and alliances at Hitachi Vantara, said: “This partnership represents a strategic move to enhance our portfolio with advanced and intelligent capabilities to orchestrate data, addressing the growing demand for robust and scalable AI solutions.”
Hammerspace’s Global Data Platform (GDP) presents a global namespace, in which data is placed, orchestrated, made available for use, and accessed as if it were local. It uses parallel NFS-based file system software to manage file and object data in globally distributed locations, across SSDs, disk drives, public cloud services, and tape media. Hitachi Vantara customers can now use GDP to access other suppliers’ storage in a single environment, and use it in GenAI training and inferencing applications.
By using Hammerspace’s advanced data orchestration capabilities, Hitachi Vantara customers will be able to unify data access, provide data for in-place AI, and consolidate data into a central data lake for AI workload access. The two companies say that Hammerspace’s “standards-based parallel file system will ensure that all your performance requirements are met for your AI workloads and will scale easily and linearly as your environment grows.”
David Flynn, CEO and founder, Hammerspace, said: “We are thrilled to announce our strategic partnership with Hitachi Vantara. This collaboration represents a significant step forward in our mission to revolutionize data orchestration and storage solutions.”
Hitachi Vantara is the first enterprise storage system supplier to ally directly with Hammerspace. It, along with NetApp and others, has existing storage array software capabilities to virtualize other suppliers’ arrays and treat their stored data as part of, in this case, the Hitachi SVOS environment. The Hammerspace deal extends this concept much further and works higher up the stack, so to speak. More information on Hitachi Vantara’s offerings in AI here.
Bootnote
Hammerspace is contributing its acquired RozoFS Mojette transform-based erasure coding to Linux for client-side erasure coding.
