infoTECH Feature

February 11, 2016

Hitachi, Pentaho Combine in Huge New Data Center Push

The data center is increasingly becoming a company's most valuable chunk of real estate. Providing the infrastructure for network operations, for access to an ever-increasing array of cloud-based services and other functions, it's hard to find more valuable parts of an organization than its data center. Hitachi (News - Alert) Data Systems (HDS) and Pentaho have come together once again to light a new spark in the data center.

The combined effort yielded a software-defined platform for big data operations, one that will serve as an alternative to those currently offered by major names like Cisco, IBM and Oracle (News - Alert). Dubbed the Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform 400, the system starts with convergence with Pentaho's Enterprise Platform. Since Pentaho is part of the Hitachi Group, as is HDS, the two are uniquely positioned to work well together. Having the Enterprise Platform in play allows the Hyper Scale-Out Platform 400 to combine compute management, storage management, and virtualization all in one unit.

The Hyper Scale-Out Platform 400 works on a hyper-convergence system, a kind of software-focused architecture that allows for a wide variety of services to be brought into one system, built with simple, off-the-shelf hardware. The heavy lifting is done at the software level, making it that much easier to accomplish all these tasks with comparatively simple hardware.

Reports note that the system can effectively run several big data frameworks, including Apache's Hadoop and Spark, as well as the Hortonworks Data Platform. Better yet, the Hyper Scale-Out Platform 400 is also scalable, at last report, meaning the system can be readily expanded as needs require.

Sean Moser, who serves as HDS' senior vice president, noted “We consistently hear from our enterprise customers that data silos and complexity are major pain points—and this only gets worse in their scale-out and big data deployments. We have solved these problems for our customers for years, but we are now applying that expertise in a new architecture.”

Companies want to take advantage of the benefits that big data and other such systems can offer, and with good reason. Big data allows companies to take what's currently known—all that individual data—and turn it into information about likely developments. If a company knows that most of its business is done in the afternoon, it knows to staff its morning shifts with fewer people, and its afternoon shifts more heavily. If it knows what items are big sellers, it knows what to buy more—and less—of. A thousand such situations fit under the banner of big data, and a company that can take advantage of all that runs better. Tools like HDS' allow companies better access because the up-front expenses are lowered; there's no need for high-end hardware.

The data center can be a powerhouse for businesses, and the combined effort of HDS and Pentaho should go a long way toward improving access to the fullest range of data center options.

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