Enterprise storage infrastructure provider Hitachi Vantura LLC today unveiled what it says is a single, hybrid cloud data platform that caters to both structured and unstructured information across the full range of storage types.

By creating a common data plane across block, file and object storage, Hitachi Vantara said, it’s providing a way for enterprises to run different applications in any location, across on-premises and cloud environments, without the complexity they currently face.

Hitachi Vantara is doing this with the debut of Virtual Storage Platform One, a new platform that it says represents a more simplified approach for enterprises to manage mission-critical workloads at scale. The company said it serves as a unified architecture to do a more efficient job of managing the challenges of modern data storage. That has become incredibly complex amid the explosion of generative artificial intelligence, distributed cloud platforms and enormous volumes of data being created by applications.

Virtual Storage Platform One solves these complexities with a single control plane, data fabric and data plane that works across block, file, object, cloud, mainframe and software-defined storage workloads. By addressing all of these environments at once, Hitachi Vantara said, Virtual Storage Platform One eliminates infrastructure, data and application silos. Thus, enterprises can create a trusted data foundation that can serve every application and workload, no matter where it’s located.

Hitachi Vantara’s claims about organizations struggling with complex data center storage infrastructure are backed by a study from its own research division. In a report on Modern Data Infrastructure Dynamics published earlier this year, Hitachi Vantara found that six out of 10 companies say they’re overwhelmed by the amount of data they’re dealing with.

Dan McConnell, Hitachi Vantar’s senior vice president of product management for storage and data infrastructure, said Virtual Storage Platform One will give enterprises a more consistent data platform. He said they’ll gain the ability to manage data more effectively across every kind of storage environment, with minimal complexity. “The design, development and construction of Virtual Storage Platform One, with a focus on reliability, security and sustainability, further enhances the impact for our customers,” he said.

Getting into the specifics, Hitachi Vantara explained that Virtual Storage Platform One paves the way for cloud self-service, where organizations can rapidly consume advanced data services such as replication at cloud-scale, without needing to perform any back-end work. Its intelligent storage management makes it simple to optimize storage pools by automatically assigning and balancing workloads as their conditions change. In addition, its integrated copy data management capability relies on replication and synchronous active storage clusters to ensure global availability of data with superior fault tolerance.

Steve McDowell of NAND Research told SiliconANGLE that Hitachi Vantara is tackling a valid problem in trying to manage the sprawl of data across cloud boundaries. He said Virtual Storage Platform One goes a long way to addressing many of these challenges, though it’s similar in some ways to existing solutions such as IBM Corp.’s Spectrum Virtualize and Komprise Inc.’s  data management platform, which also manage block and object storage across clouds.

“While these competitors do much of what Hitachi is offering, Virtual Storage Platform One stands out with its completeness,” McDowell said. “There’s nobody else offering a single, integrated data management plane for file, object, block and mainframe storage. This is a nice differentiation, and Hitachi has a long history of delivering enterprise storage, giving it the credibility needed for this kind of solution.”

International Data Corp. analyst Ashish Nadkarni said Hitachi Vantara has effectively consolidated its entire storage portfolio into a single, cohesive platform to simplify data accessibility across entire organizations. “The significance of this rollout lies in the platform’s ability to offer a unified data plane, seamlessly spanning across block, file, object, mainframe, cloud and SDS workloads,” he added.

Hitachi Vantara’s McConnell appeared on SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio theCUBE, earlier this year to discuss how the company is overcoming the key challenges in managing the rapid growth of data, effectively providing a prelude to today’s news:

Image: DCstudio/Freepik