Hitachi Vantara recently announced enhancements to its Smart Data Center solution that elevates the use of AI and real-time analytics in an effort to optimize all aspects of IT operations across data centers. According to the company, these enhancements help enterprises deliver business outcomes by maximizing the power of data no matter where it resides, from the data center to the cloud and out to the edge.
Smart Data Center is a complete end-to-end subscription service that is pre-engineered to maximize speed of delivery, yet flexible enough to adapt to each organization’s data center requirements. It is designed to optimize global data center service health, capacity management, performance management and cooling. By advancing the use of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the Smart Data Center solution creates self-optimizing data centers that lower IT operational costs, reduce risk and increase IT agility to respond to business change.
The latest enhancements advance Smart Data Center include AI-Driven Cooling, intelligent SAN optimization and automated provisioning of heterogeneous storage.
Optimization with AI-Driven Cooling
Hitachi Vantara is partnering with Vigilent, a provider of dynamic cooling management systems, to help deliver the Smart Data Center cooling optimization module. Vigilent technology uses machine learning, IoT temperature sensors, and closed-loop control to enable Smart Data Center to proactively monitor and analyze data center cooling, self-correct temperature and airflow issues, and provide IT administrators with improved operational control.
According to Hitachi, this partnership enables Smart Data Center to provide:
- Up to 38% average annual savings;
- Increased data center capacity by ensuring cooling equipment is performing at maximum capacity, allowing facilities to increase the load on existing infrastructure;
- Improved data center thermal reliability by eliminating most data center hot spots and enabling dynamic cooling that automatically responds to any changes in the data center;
- Enhanced data center management control with the ability to specify the exact maximum air temperature delivered to each rack in the data center;
- Increased IT management insight based on advanced analytics that easily identify where there is sufficient or insufficient thermal redundancy as well as which cooling equipment needs maintenance.
Intelligent SAN Optimization
According to Hitachi, its new Smart Data Center can lower storage costs with real-time, continuous optimization of SAN resources that enables efficient and cost-effective use of storage assets. It also identifies when hot and cold spots are developing within Hitachi storage to help ensure efficient utilization of storage assets and placement of storage in appropriate tiers based on costs and defined service performance requirements.
Smart Data Center gives IT managers the insights they need to make informed operational and budgeting decisions through advanced predictive analytics and dynamic dashboards that provide a visual mapping of application storage on a cost and performance basis. Machine learning-driven predictive and prescriptive insights help customers identify opportunities and recommendations for optimization. It also provides the ability to perform AI-based simulations that allow customers to evaluate future scenarios before Smart Data Center takes action on their behalf.
Smart Provisioning
Smart Data Center now includes automated provisioning of heterogeneous storage assets, covering end-to-end processes from planning to execution. It provides the ability to orchestrate IT provisioning tasks in an automated fashion through analytics-based capacity and performance insights, along with machine learning-driven recommendations that are integrated with ITSM applications. Hitachi says customers benefit from time savings by eliminating the need to make many manual changes in the data center, reduced data center and IT services downtime, and improved operational and regulatory compliance with the ability to document changes. Smart provisioning capabilities also free up budget and SAN resources for allocation to other strategic projects.