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AI-Powered Observability Is Changing How We Manage Enterprise Storage Forever
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Unified visibility has transformed from a luxury into a business-critical imperative for enterprises navigating today's complex IT landscape. In this revealing conversation with Sunitha Rao, who leads Hitachi Vantara's hybrid cloud business unit, we explore why this shift has occurred and how their newly launched VSP360 platform delivers game-changing capabilities.
The driving forces behind unified visibility's rise are compelling - AI's acceleration, evolving regulatory landscapes across regions, and the pressing need for financial agility as we approach 2025. Organizations struggling with fragmented visibility across hybrid environments can no longer afford the inefficiencies of siloed approaches. As Sunitha explains, "You really have the AI that's allowing you to have data insights that are explainable, that allow you to give a cross-domain visibility across the board."
VSP360's visibility-driven architecture represents a fundamental rethinking of enterprise storage management. Rather than bolting on capabilities, Hitachi has built a unified control plane that provides intelligent insights through what Sunitha calls a "single pane of smart glass." The platform leverages AI-powered observability to deliver real-time performance telemetry, predictive analytics, and automated recommendations that help organizations optimize their entire storage fleet - whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.
Perhaps most impressive is how VSP360 addresses the ever-present challenge of shadow IT and cloud sprawl. Through comprehensive visibility and AI-driven recommendations, organizations gain the ability to detect idle resources, misaligned storage tiers, and potential cost optimizations. One beta customer reported freeing up 60% of their IT team's efforts by leveraging these capabilities - allowing valuable technical talent to focus on high-value strategic initiatives rather than routine management tasks.
For CIOs embarking on this journey toward unified visibility, Sunita offers practical advice: start by acknowledging fragmentation as both a technical and business requirement, conduct a comprehensive asset assessment, and seek platforms that provide unified control with built-in governance. As she notes, "Your visibility is basically building efficiency, and efficiency is basically building you to transform the way you manage your data environments."
Curious about how unified visibility could transform your organization's approach to data management? Explore how Hitachi's visibility-driven architecture might help you gain control of your diverse IT landscape while preparing for the AI-driven future.
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Hey everybody, delighted to dive into the world of unified visibility today with a true innovator in the field at Hitachi Vantara Sunita. How are you?
Speaker 2:Hey Evan, I'm good. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well. Thanks so much for joining. You guys are doing amazing work in the enterprise IT world. Before that, maybe introduce yourself your team within Hitachi Vantara and the larger Hitachi organization.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm Sunita Rao. I lead the hybrid cloud business unit for Hitachi. That means building the unified control plane, which is the bus that you've been hearing about with VSP360, and enabling the hybrid cloud business with all of the hyperscalers. That's the other interesting part of my job, which I think we should have a conversation at a later time, but today we should focus on all the innovations that we are bringing to the forefront.
Speaker 2:That said, I think you know about the bigger Hitachi brand. It's a big conglomerate with different business units serving different scenarios and different businesses, like rail, energy and many others, of which Hitachi Vantara brings the storage business to the forefront and specifically we have the VSP1 portfolio that enables us to look at all of our file block, object and software-defined offerings that we bring to the table, and with that we kind of now come with a control plane that's a unified control plane, with VSP 1360 that helps with managing all of the data estates in different formats. So it's an interesting mix of a lot of things at Hitachi Vantara, which is going to be very good for especially bringing innovations to the forefront.
Speaker 1:And you've been very busy on launches and innovation, so let's dive in to one key theme. You're focused on unified visibility. It's no longer just a nice to have. It's really become a core business mandate this year. Why is that? What's changed in the IT landscape that's made it foundation to pretty much every enterprise?
Speaker 2:I think the big change or the big shift that's coming is driven by AI, as we all know, and unified visibility helps us to remove the scattered silos and no longer it's a guesswork. You really have the AI that's allowing you to have data insights that are explainable, that allow you to give a cross-domain visibility across the board, and this helps enterprises to act decisively and especially at scale. You need this support to get to the faster decision-making and having an ability to actually look at all your assets in one pane of glass, not just the part of AI. I think regulations industry is evolving, whether it's from GDPR to all the way to the US, for all the new regulations with data sovereignty and security. These have become major priorities and business decisions, which is where unified visibility brings to the table, so that can help with proactive management.
Speaker 2:You can look at real time anomaly detection. You can look at faster response times to ransomware and insider threats. These are the new common things in this era Now coming to 2025, why is it important? The big ticket item in 2025 is financial agility. You really need to look at the sprawl of the assets you have. How do you optimize these underutilized assets and also help with managing the spend, and that's what, you know, unified visibility brings to the table. Last but not the least, enterprises are looking for SLAs that drive operational resilience and allow you to have AI-powered you know ability to self-heal systems to look at making changes to their environments on the fly with the recommendations that you provide. This gives a personalized, uninterrupted visibility to deliver the results faster than what we are used to in the past. I think that actually forms the core of why unified visibility becomes a business priority, as enterprises are making decisions to buy their environments in the modern era today.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, and I'm looking on your website. The newly announced VSP360 offers something called a visibility-driven architecture. Sounds intriguing, very powerful. What does it mean in practice, day-to-day?
Speaker 2:The reason we call it a visibility-driven architecture is this is where you really need to look at how do you integrate and harmonize systems that are very different across the board. These are done through data fabrics or leveraging metadata management that can really work with the real-time pipelines to provide insights, efficient data flows across the environments. In addition to it, you really need to shift from the view of looking at a reactive way of monitoring environments to a more proactive observable, and also look at AI ops in a complex environment that can help you to turn something into your competitive advantage. Now, keeping that in mind, keeping the definition of this visibility-driven architecture in mind, the VSP360 comes with a unified control plane that will allow you to visualize, manage, look at your entire storage in a single pane of smart glass. The reason I use this word smart glass is where this architecture comes into the picture. That will provide you with insights which are smarter. That will give you a way of managing the assets in a far more robust fashion. Clearsight has been there with the Hitachi portfolio for a long time now, and with now the change with VSP360 ClearSight, what we've brought to the table is AI-powered observability. This will give you a real-time performance telemetry, allow you to provide predictive analytics and that drives into automated recommendations. We are not kind of pushing the recommendations on the customers, are not kind of pushing the recommendations on the customers, but we kind of provide these recommendations for the customers to act upon as they look at their fleet and look at managing these different systems in different environments. Whether it's on-prem, hybrid edge, you can actually look at managing your entire assets and simplify the life cycle, whether it is capacity planning, firmware upgrades or even looking at any tech refresh as an opportunity available online.
Speaker 2:The next is looking at the next phase of life cycle. How do you build policy enforcement and governance? We've come with an agentic approach in this case, where you can dynamically adapt to business policies, allow you to look at PII protection, give data retention requirements, look at compliance tagging and everything driven through an AIOps framework which has a built-in capability, not a bolt-on architecture. That's another big addition to the BSP360 portfolio. Last but not the least, I would say you really are looking for automation-ready infrastructure as code, which is the newer way of managing assets at scale, and we look at Ansible tools or even Terraform that can provide actionable visibility through the CICD pipelines.
Speaker 2:Actionable visibility through the CICD pipelines, allow DevOps and IDSM teams to look at this at a scale and also align with the changes that we need to make in an automated fashion. In a nutshell, what we are doing with 360 is basically looking at providing data awareness into data advantage, which will then help our customers to look at faster decision making, smarter resource utilization and also be resilient, compliant and cost optimized. All of these different lifecycle capabilities, summed up together across different data estate requirements, is what is BSP360 all about? Long-winded answer, but I think it helps to give you why we call it visibility-driven and why it makes a big difference to what we bring to the table.
Speaker 1:Wow sounds amazing. As you know, shadow IT has increasingly become a concern in the enterprise and cloud sprawl is getting really out of control. How do you think about helping organizations regain control and reduce risk versus maybe more traditional approaches?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. You can really track the usage, performance, capacity, all the metrics, either for all your assets, on-prem, or if they're in the cloud, or if they're hybrid. Right, you could get a cloud smart view by not just getting blinded by the spend, but actually look at the investment that you've made in the cloud assets as well, ahead of time. This is where you can really help with shadow IT. That's one of the key capabilities that we've realized as a differentiator for us. In addition to that, I think you need a method, which is an AI ops driven option, that could help detect idle resources. It could help detect misaligned storage, tiers, underused storage, all of them together, which can actually create a recommendation engine. You can actually create, you know, recommendation engines depending on the environment that the customer is using into, because every enterprise has its definition of what an idle resource means, what a misaligned storage means.
Speaker 2:Right, we can't come with one shirt or one size fits all. It kind of can be different to different environments. So what we provide is a capability to have a recommendation engine that can auto-trigger consolidation, that can auto-trigger cost-saving actions and provide you with a report that can allow you to have the visibility of your usage. Next is you need to really look at a granular way of knowing your consumption and how you can actually have real-time metering to help teams to know what their consumption capability is, provide a telemetry of, say, a 90-day post or a preview to tell them okay, we are going to be up the capacity or we're going to lower the capacity, depending on these recommendations. To sum it all, this is where you can actually get away from the shadow IT or the sprawl or the spend, by having these tools that give them more of a proactive approach than a reactive approach. I would say that's what 360 brings to the table.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. The other CIO imperative is dealing with complexity, adding simplicity, the IT experience, the user experience. How do you think about delivering simplicity, but at scale?
Speaker 2:So I would. In fact, I stole this word from one of the CIOs that I was talking to. His definition of simplicity was clickety-click. He was like I need this clickety-click experience. You know I'm not really looking at all the bells and whistles, but I really need it Now.
Speaker 2:What exactly does it mean, or do the CIOs mean by this term? Is you need to have a unified control, given you cannot have a fragmented, hybrid environment that can cause an overhead of resources and with no visibility at all. Then you need intuitive dashboards, which mean that you don't need somebody with a PhD to come and explain what these dashboards are, and these dashboards driving into actionable insights, with governance baked in, not bolted on, remember. And then you need to really look at automation first as the key requirement for the business, so that it can help to simplify, you know, and orchestrate complexity. It should be like a okay lack of better comparisons, maybe a Spotify playlist, you know, as simple as that in the real time. I feel that is what simplicity means from a CIO lens. You know that could really help to make the business more manageable on a day-to-day fashion.
Speaker 1:That's great, it sounds amazing. Sadly, so many organizations, so many CIOs are kind of stuck in this fragmented, siloed environment. Lots of technical debt. I mean, where should they start with this journey? What's a good first step that would move the needle?
Speaker 2:I would say, firstly, the first step starts with acknowledging right. Acknowledging that fragmentation is just not a technical requirement, but it's a business requirement. So, first of all, having that acknowledgement is the key priority for the CIOs. From then it starts off with how do you take the inventory of all the cows that is out there, meaning, like, before you automate, you should start with a comprehensive asset and a data landscape assessment. That's the number one thing you need to really look at. How are we running this? How is it performing? Do I have the visibility and the transparency that I really require? And then need to align with the two key functions in the organization, which is finance and security.
Speaker 2:Now, once you do that, I think the next step is to look at the offerings that are providing unified control plane as a priority. What does that mean? You don't need 10 dashboards, you need one. You need a platform like 360. That can help you with all of your different types of storage assets, whether it's a file or a block, or an object or a cloud, it shouldn't really matter. The experience remains the same ServiceNow, for example, you know and then you can have the AIOps, which drives the policy enforcement, like the way we spoke before, where the policy enforcement has to be an agentic in model that can allow you to, you know, really enforce governance decisions and which makes it easy for them to manage their environments.
Speaker 2:The next most important thing is observability actionable observability.
Speaker 2:Gone are the days of monitoring.
Speaker 2:We are really looking at investing in observability tools that offer insight and automation, with predictive analytics, real-time alerts, auto-remediation, consumption warnings, and also should look at how can this platform help so the teams can look at something really bigger.
Speaker 2:And again, I can't stress enough on the governance and the kind of, you know, the architectural basic requirements that governance brings to the table. We should really look at embedding that and not bolted on and having to look at compliance, logging, making all of these, you know, automated decisions, instead of doing the manual intervention at a later time. If you can actually come up with these things, I would then summarize and say start with one domain, which is storage optimization or cost governance, one of the two, and then you win in either cases. End of the day, we should really look at tying up the entire conversation so far into three different bullets. Your visibility is basically building efficiency and the efficiency is basically building you to transform the way you manage your data environments. And that sums it all together in how CIOs should think through when they're evaluating systems that they need to procure for their infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Amazing advice. As you know, we've seen a surge in storage requirements due to the AI wave we're in right now. What role does AIOps offer to stay ahead of the many issues, complexities that arise with all of this data?
Speaker 2:I think the big thing that AIOps is actually looking at is building a method of automation which is slightly different to what we were doing in the past.
Speaker 2:Here we are implementing the machine learning outcomes that can help simplify a lot of manual tasks into high-value projects and, instead of looking at firefighting at the end, you're really looking at this kind of I mean 360 brings in like a federated observability layer. So what does this mean Is it can help you to correlate telemetry, correlate logs, correlate events. All of this sums it up under the AIOps capability that can provide, with you know, self-aware storage that can act on its own, where you kind of look at proactively enabling some of the requirements, like when you see like a potential performance degradation, for example, you kind of alert it ahead of time and then you kind of put a proactive method of looking at enabling a fix right at the beginning, instead of waiting for that to happen eventually at a later time. I think this is going to be the key differentiator for us with VSP 360. That basically allows you to have an AI-powered capability that can enable, with automation and simplify when you're really looking at different environments coming together with the same experience across the board.
Speaker 1:Great. Speaking of different environments, I mean interoperability has come a long way. It's leap years from where it used to be, but there's still gaps, there are still issues. How do you think about VSP 360, unifying those sort of diverse systems and the whole API economy that's coming together?
Speaker 2:So the way we have designed, just like how I reiterated on the visible architecture as being the core tenet of our entire 360 architecture, I think API first was the model that we've implemented in the 360 environment. It's about the APIs having your infrastructure connect and coordinate with diverse tools. You don't need a vendor lock-in. We don't want a manual intervention we are looking at. I think the best example I can refer is having you know an environment that can really be mimicked around AWS, simplification, the Azure power and having you know an on-prem environment, all of the three working together and providing you with a seamless experience. It doesn't differentiate between any of those environments. Next, I would say we look at automation ready day one.
Speaker 2:So with the API first approach, I think the biggest advantage we have is the programmability of deployment, programmability of provisioning policies, analytics. We have the foundation for the infrastructure as a code that essentially will be an input to DevOps and the AIOps workflows enterprises actually use. From here you call out on the ecosystem extensions where you could actually integrate into ISM systems. You could actually look at backup, security apps. You can trigger a service now ticket with one API call and you're pretty much done. So when enterprises come in and ask for 360, it just doesn't mean like we enforce a single pane of glass. We give the set of APIs that could be integrated into their own environments as well, without requiring for another UI to be managed, and that's what the power of API first model brings to the table with VSP360 as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So, as you know, with IT teams there's a lot of pressure to do more with less. We're in this era of efficiency. How do you think about, beyond automation, reducing complexity, boosting productivity what that means for the average IT analyst worker on the ground?
Speaker 2:I would say that you know, as we started the initial conversation, the IT teams are getting leaner and leaner and the expectations are sky high With the 360,. What we can provide is a suite, a high performance and an AI powered suite that will help them to do more with less. What do I mean by that? So the first thing it uses, as I mentioned previously, is it uses a machine learning approach to automate everything right from an anomaly detection use case to root cause analysis or even to do a capacity planning. These are all pre-built modules that have been in the system that can actually look at a predictability where you can actually be proactive in managing the impact ahead of time. In fact, one of our customers actually was beta testing us came up with a metric where he said they freed up 60% of their IT team's efforts and have them focus on other high-value projects by leveraging this AI-powered automation capability that we bring to the table Again. The other big shift that the IT teams can see is the way we have unified. You have a single control play. You're not juggling with five screens and 20 dashboards across, but you're just having one dashboard that can provide you with policies, configurations and observability, and also, you have an ability to actually integrate Ansible and ServiceNow within the same environment as well. You can actually eliminate that 10 different options for them to really look at managing the assets, which means you just have one engineer to manage the entire infrastructure in one single pane of glass.
Speaker 2:Lastly, we have an optimizer capability that's built in, which basically tracks and reallocates resources depending on the storage utilization. You can actually get the reports you know created ahead of time, whether it's a 90-day, 180-day, one year ahead, it depends on how you want to manage this reporting. So, which means no over-provisioning you don't need to look at specific data tiering softwares to come and then give you cost optimization. You can actually construct it in a way so that you're optimized for your resources that are being utilized. What does this do?
Speaker 2:Lower TCO, higher ROI and again, all of this coming with SLAs, and I think that is another big advantage for the IT teams, especially the ones that are struggling to manage everything together. Lastly, I would like to touch upon the built-in governance, which means very few audits. It's automated, audit-ready, highly regulated. You can actually have PII and ransomware detection at just one click. So it's reducing your compliance workloads, helping you to improve your security posture. So, in a nutshell, I would say the same metric that one of our customers have given us. It's a 60% reduction in the way you look at managing the assets with one tool or one platform that can bring to the table all of these capabilities.
Speaker 1:In a nutshell, Wow, that's quite a mic drop moment. It must be quite gratifying to you and the team delivering this solution.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's been enriching when you hear customer feedback come through, especially for something that you've built so passionately. I think it's an endorsement that helps the teams to stay motivated to do more.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and you've been so heads down delivering this solution to market. Dare I even ask what's next? Or should we come back to that?
Speaker 2:Oh, you should come back to that. I think we might need one more hour to talk about what's next, because with AI, I think there's a lot of anticipation, specifically with agentic, you would see us talking a lot more about it, especially in the hybrid world and with a SaaS capability very soon, and I think we should have another conversation at that time to talk about the new innovations that we're bringing to the table.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to see more. Thanks so much for sharing the vision and the mission Extraordinary, onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Really, really looking forward to the next set of innovations that you know that I would love to really chat with you again.
Speaker 1:All right. Thanks so much, and thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing. Take care.