Organisations must rebuild operations and speed up digital solutions: Hitachi Vantara

Data is critical to a company’s success. A long-term digital strategy can provide a stable foundation.Your data storage solution shouldn’t be based on on a one-size-fits-all basis. Companies should put in place an action plan to ensure they are ready for this new cloud dynamic.

In an interview with Sanjay Agrawal, Technology Head, Hitachi Vantara, we addressed the challenges companies faces during migrating their data, and manage the storage. Excerpts:

DQ: What are the critical data storage challenges that enterprises face today, and how are you addressing them?

Sanjay Agrawal: Data strategy has become an integral part of IT strategy for companies of all sizes. Some of the issues with the data are- Increase of the data size, obtaining of consistent information and definitions, and reduction of the time needed for data transfer to warehouses from third-party systems, Excessive data leads to poor performance – a host of new performance problems may arise, Inconsistent team-wide data and values can cause serious issues, Data strategy failure.

One of the biggest challenges for most companies is the lack of a data strategy. The abundance of data can make it very difficult to know where to begin, analyse, build and integrate data products. It means that you look at your overall business goals and then see where you can meet your data goals - not the other way around.

Business will need to increase the value and life cycle of the existing data services, such as data reduction, automation, and metro clusters to improve the full cost of ownership of the infrastructure.

We are addressing these challenges by creating AI-enabled operations that can improve operational efficiencies in IT quickly. Continuous data centre operations can leverage data-driven learning to improve automation efforts.

With integrated IT and automated analysis, data path monitoring, intelligent supply and orchestrated problem-solving can be achieved at the end of the entire data path.

DQ: How are you helping businesses break down the conventional silos between core, edge and cloud to provide the basis for data management?

 Sanjay: Many data lakes and warehouses will be deployed or moved to a cloud platform in the next five years. It will lead to increased data management and integration complexity in a multi-cloud environment.

Lumada DataOps Suite reduces costs for cloud migration while enabling you to mix cloud data on the premises, delivering AI-driven automation and collaboration, across multi-cloud, core, and edge.

Our IoT platform provides out-of-the-box templates and analytics capable of promptly developing end-to-end industrial IoT solutions, like the predictive maintenance of heavy assets. The aim is to help manufacturers and corporations to achieve IoT benefits quickly and with less risk.

It has been designed to work anywhere—in any cloud, on-site, hybrid, Hyper-V or VMware—and has gained a lot of traction since it was first introduced. It is a platform that has been designed from the ground up for companies to receive data streams and to provide operating insights from large amounts of highly connected data.

DQ: How can companies harness the value of data through a flexible, automated hybrid cloud environment?

Sanjay: A private cloud provides flexible, automated, on-demand IT without the risks associated with leaving data control in a public cloud. A hybrid cloud strategy is used by 87 percent of the companies.

A hybrid cloud enables you to keep selected data on a public cloud while viewing and handling all your data on one screen to add to your private cloud. It gives you the best of both worlds and the highest control.

A hybrid cloud can be adapted to meet your unique business requirements and applications on your premises, either owned by you or by using public cloud resources.

The automation, self-service, and corporate results of your business are enhanced with this approach. The business case for hybrid cloud adoption is impressive: flexible, efficient on-demand access to applications and data, wherever it can be most useful.

 Hitachi Enterprise Cloud provides a secure, fully managed, flexible, and end-to-end hybrid cloud. The entire range of VMware environments is supported. It also provides a leading DevOps and data services automated solution with an application platform, full Kubernetes, data services hub, and Hitachi Cloud Accelerator Platform.

It will improve efficiency and productivity, increase market agility, and make your data and applications more flexible with the benefits like making your teams more efficient and competitive by giving them the instruments they need to carry out their work quickly and easily, without overallocation.

Secondly decreasing market time by building a more agile IT environment that can align the right resources to the right groups at the right value quickly and safely, and freeing staff through simple, automated self-service requests and compliance to enable them to conduct more strategic activities.

DQ: How has Hitachi Vantara managed business continuity solutions in the post-COVID-19 era?

Sanjay: Organisations must rebuild operations and processes and recover from the effects of the pandemic. They must speed up digital solutions to address manual processes and old systems to get stronger.

In 2020, Hitachi expanded its portfolio of digital manufacturing solutions, services, and consulting services to help manufacturers accelerate Manufacturing 4.0 initiatives and to assist with safety restarting production in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our domain solutions include the expanded portfolio includes health, safety, and environment solutions leveraging Lumada Video Insights technologies which can be configured for applications such as elevated body temperature identification and hand-washing detection.

Modernizing and digitalizing such capabilities will be essential for manufacturers to recover from the pandemic quickly, and to create the more agile and resilient manufacturing operations needed in the future, analyse customer challenges from the beginning, create a hypothesis and verify the results before any solution is proposed through digital consulting and manufacturing.

Enhance operations to connect systems from design through production and product use by customers through a digital thread. For example, the digital thread connects the entire ERP system chain to what is happening at the plant.

We Optimise the supply chain to lower the logistics costs and become agile and willing to react to the changes. By optimising and improving logistics networks, the inventory levels can be reduced using shorter lead times, and ensure that customer commitments meet scheduling and operational targets, reduce inventory costs and reduce production lead times through dynamic planning and operation optimisation analyses of the manufacturing line.

Our powerful and unique Lumada technology is the source of many of our services. Our customisable Lumada Manufacturing Insights solutions can adapt to any production environment or process to enable organisations to carry out OT and IT silos, to consolidate information, and to provide advanced analytics and insights into changing operations across engineering, plants and businesses.

DQ: What is the importance of key micro technology trends like K8s, containerisation, etc.?

Sanjay: One of the latest developments of cloud computing is containerisation. Many organisations, big and small, look at containers to help improve the management of application life cycles by integrating and delivering them continuously. In addition, certain container implementations conform to the open-source principles, which appeal to companies that do not lock in at a specific supplier.

Gartner expects that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production.

Containers are also the foundation of a private cloud and, for many organisations, a throwback to the early days of cloud computing. It is typical in situations where organisations can carry out both existing app loads and new application workloads.

Containers help to meet three key applications that companies require in the cloud:

1. Upgrade your current applications.

2. Create new native cloud business apps.

3. Work with cloud services 

 Hitachi Kubernetes Service helps organizations accelerate the adoption of cloud-native applications by streamlining the management of the underlying infrastructure and Kubernetes cluster deployments.

It also significantly simplifies how developers will use and consume IT-delivered container services whether these are delivered from on-premises or hybrid environments. Hitachi Kubernetes Service provides enterprise-grade security with secure communications between the Kubernetes clusters and the SaaS management plane in the cloud.

Key benefits are:Simplicity and ease of deployment through a single management pane that deploys, manages, and governs across all of a customer's private, hybrid and multi-cloud implementations to reduce risk and complexity, and a unified dashboard that enables efficient management and governance of multiple on-premises or the cloud-based Kubernetes clusters and a large number of resources across them

Centralized monitoring and alerting that operators can use to solve Kubernetes root-cause analysis challenges to lower the mean time to respond and recover to achieve service level objectives, also, Pre-populated applications in the robust service catalog to help developers start rapidly, using the latest Kubernetes-based orchestration and container services.