Hitachi Vantara Unveils VSP E990 Storage Array, Adds Flexible Consumption Model

The VSP E990 brings the enterprise-class capabilities of the company's flagship VSP 5000 family in a package targeted at midsize enterprises,and gives customers a choice of purchase, lease or as-a-service consumption.

Hitachi Vantara Tuesday introduced a new storage system it said offers the full gamut of enterprise-class storage capabilities while being priced for the midsize enterprise market.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based storage vendor also expanded its partner program with EverFlex, a new program that gives customers multiple ways to consume Hitachi Vantara storage.

The new Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E990 storage array is the fastest all-NVMe array for midsize enterprises, said Kimberly King, vice president of global channels and partners.

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"The E990 takes all the enterprise-class storage capabilities and guarantees and puts them into a new price point and configuration for midrange enterprises," King told CRN. "We feel the midrange enterprise is a market that is growing the quickest."

The VSP E990 fits in the Hitachi Vantara line between its high-end VSP 5000 family and VSP E900, and has all the enterprise capabilities of the VSP 5000, King said. "We're not making it cheap, but instead we're making it cost-effective," she said.

The VSP E990 delivers a new competitive advantage to Hitachi Vantara because it brings the technology of the VSP 5000 line to the midrange enterprise, said Joe Kadlec, vice president and senior partner at Consiliant Technologies, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider and Hitachi Vantara channel partner.

"If the price point is right, this is a big advantage for channel partners," Kadlec told CRN.

The new array could open new markets and help partners exploit existing markets, Kadlec said.

"A lot of prospects think of Hitachi as extremely high end," he said. "If the price is right, the E990 gives us a foot in the door. We've been asking for this. And now it's come to fruition. It's a good win for our customers and for us."

The VSP E990 features all-NVMe flash storage connectivity for up to 5.8 million IOs per second performance with latencies as low as 64 microseconds. It is server-class-memory-ready, and can be upgraded to NVMe Over Fabric (NVMe-oF),and scale to up to 16.6 petabytes. It comes with the Hitachi Flash Assurance Program, which guarantees 100 percent data availability.

The array comes bundled with Hitachi Ops Center, the company's management software that provides data protection, infrastructure automation, telemetry analytics and other management capabilities, King said.

Hitachi Vantara Tuesday also unveiled EverFlex, a new financing program for the company's storage technology.

EverFlex allows customers to acquire Hitachi Vantara storage however they feel is best, whether it is a purchase, a lease or as a service, King said.

"We'll also do financing for our partners," she said. "And we'll enable cloud service providers and managed service providers to deliver the storage on a consumption basis as a service. Partners can even do multiple consumption models at the same time."

EverFlex is available first with the VSP E990 and will roll out with other Hitachi Vantara arrays over the next few months, King said.

"We're trying to get really aggressive with partners and customers, which is important when customers don't have the ability to make big purchases or who otherwise need an as-a-service consumption model," she said.

EverFlex adds a layer of flexibility to Hitachi Vantara's storage technology, Kadlec said.

"A lot of customers are going to different consumption models," he said. "Having the technology as a service means customers can pay as they go. And the ability to buy what's needed as needed is better than buying more than is needed today."