Cisco, Hitachi deliver managed hybrid cloud services

Cisco and Hitachi Vantara have unveiled the first fruits of their partnership, signed last year, that aims to bring managed as-a-service offerings to enterprise customers with hybrid cloud environments.

The joint offering, Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud, includes a range of converged infrastructure services that meld compute, networking and software technologies from Cisco and storage capabilities from Hitachi. The services are customizable and feature consumption-based pricing.

Organizations are finding that consumption-based IT infrastructure delivered as a service can help overcome challenges often present in hybrid cloud deployments, such as operational complexity, rising costs and increasing security risk, according to Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute.

“The Cisco/Hitachi converged infrastructure services will simplify and accelerate application delivery. These solutions are designed, validated, and optimized for a wide variety of application workloads and use cases so that IT teams can reduce their complexity and risk,” Foster wrote in a blog about the new services.

The technology involved in the services primarily includes Cisco Unified Computing System X Series servers and its Intersight cloud management platform. A variety of other Cisco networking technologies are also part of its hybrid cloud umbrella, such as security, Nexus switches and SD-WAN support.

EverFlex is Hitachi’s managed as-a-service platform, and its Vantara Hybrid Cloud Managed Services offer a variety of data storage capabilities including:

• Flexible packages, including containers-as-a-service for on-premises and cloud environments, storage arrays and software-defined storage.
• Data protection services, including backup, disaster recovery, encryption and ransomware protection.
• Monitoring and alerting, capacity management, provisioning, and IT change management. 
• Support for predictive analytics.

Customers can customize and combine services, such as Hitachi’s Infrastructure Orchestration as a Service and Cisco Intersight, to bring full observability, cloud-like management for on-premises and cloud environments, performance analytics, hybrid cloud observability, and automation, the companies said.

Hitachi Vantara and Cisco announced their hybrid cloud services development partnership in June 2023, promising to integrate Cisco networking technologies with Hitachi’s storage products and deliver data center infrastructure and hybrid cloud managed services.