Customers are increasingly focused on as-a-Service hybrid cloud environments and the need to ensure that the technology they are investing in today can support the complexity of the technology requirements of tomorrow, driven by AI and the increasing importance of data. To meet this customer need, Hitachi Vantara and Cisco have recently strengthened their partnership, as outlined in the blog, The Superpower of Partnership: Cisco and Hitachi Vantara Deliver Best-in-class Solutions.
Bringing together Cisco’s compute and data center networking solutions with Hitachi’s storage expertise, we have created a set of Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure. Businesses can now capitalize on the benefits of on-prem and cloud environments through a hybrid cloud solution that incorporates industry-leading technology with SLA-backed service delivery. Hitachi Vantara’s Hybrid Cloud solution is now third-party certified as a Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud service as it incorporates its market-defining EverFlex managed service capabilities, significantly differentiating it from the competition in the following ways.
Pay-per use elastic consumption
Expanding EverFlex offerings using Cisco technology provides a flexible, as-a-service solution with cloud-like consumption for hybrid and on-premises solutions such as compute, storage, and backup. EverFlex offerings range from fully managed as a service to asset-only consumption with minimal services.
Instead of seeing monthly bills that cover hardware, software, and service subscriptions with no flexibility options, customers are offered variable consumption options based on a built-in, high-efficiency model. This includes just-in-time adjustments for capacity expansion that can help reduce the consumption gap related to new technology adoption. Customers consume unit-based hardware, software, and services bundled to meet their unique needs.
“Hitachi Vantara built its Managed Services business on the basis of delivering a better outcome for customers looking for a comprehensive storage solution. I’m excited to add to this, becoming a Cisco Service Provider Partner for Managed Services. Hitachi Vantara and Cisco are both looking to deliver solutions for customers who require the highest level of service, flexibility, and reliability.”
—Jeb Horton, Senior Vice President, Global Services, Hitachi Vantara
Performance and SLAs
Hitachi Vantara reliability engineering brings a long history of successfully delivering services to customers that are scalable, with high service levels, no unplanned downtime, and the flexibility to respond to business changes–all backed by Hitachi Vantara’s 100 percent data availability guarantee.
Guaranteed SLAs of 99.99 percent or higher across the entire stack instill customers with confidence and trust in these solutions for their critical applications.
Efficiency and cost savings
As part of its EverFlex offering, Hitachi Vantara maintains much tighter control of the end-to-end solution, from manufacturing to services. Savings derived from go-forward pricing for Hitachi products are passed on to customers, along with the ability to drive greater utility from technical and services investments. Customers typically see a 30 to 50 percent TCO reduction vs. customer-managed solutions. Hitachi Vantara significantly enhances this capability through its technology partnership with Cisco.
Additionally, a Forrester TEI report researched the benefit of consuming Hitachi Vantara Managed Services and determined a composite ROI of 214 percent.
Integration with Hitachi’s AIOps platform (“HIOaaS”)
The open automation framework of the HIOaaS platform brings additional capabilities to simplify and improve operations. Integration and observability of the entire hybrid cloud provides insights on costs, configurations, and effective usage across lines of business. Automation can convert most virtual machines into containers using a standard, repeatable process. Containerized workloads become portable between the public cloud and on-premises data center(s), hosted on an EverFlex stack.
“Together, Hitachi Vantara and Cisco can satisfy some of the most complex technology requirements in the market. We recognize the increasing focus on hybrid environments, AI, analytics, and other data-intensive requirements and look forward to our partnership to enable innovation in these areas. And like Cisco, we both are heavily committed to supporting our channel partners in selling these solutions.” – Jeb Horton, Senior Vice President, Global Services, Hitachi Vantara
The HIOaaS AI/ML engine improves observability and analyzes the operational ecosystem to learn, detect, correlate, reduce, and automatically remediate potential issues before they occur. Combining AI/ML with an improved operational dataset helps meet the high availability SLA mentioned earlier by detecting anomalies more quickly, improving environmental stability, reducing the time to detect and resolve incidents to minutes, and automatically triaging up to 99 percent of incoming issues.
By integrating Cisco technologies within its HIOaaS platform and earning the Cisco Powered Services specialization for Hybrid Cloud, Hitachi Vantara is well positioned to help Cisco customers harness the power of hybrid cloud.
Learn more about the offers and outcomes available from Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi Vantara Infrastructure Services
Hitachi Vantara Managed Services
Hitachi Vantara EverFlex
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Big like from EMEA 🙂
Awesome article!