Hitachi Vantara, the company that now combines the operations of Pentaho, Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi Insight Group, has now announced a new ‘turnkey appliance’ for IoT deployments.
The Lumada-powered Hitachi IoT Appliance is delivered as a software appliance and the technology’s ‘hyperconverged meets microservices’ architecture has Hitachi’s storage and compute functions already engineered-in.
A software appliance is a defined set of code and application architecture with corresponding components, microservices and supporting library and code stream dependencies, but, delivered and supplied with a specific set of other engineering (such as storage) and operating system resources. In simpler terms, it’s an app supplied with a chunk of virtual computer that it runs inside.
The Hitachi IoT Appliance has been fully pre-architected and pre-validated to provide a plug-and-play (hence the term ‘turnkey’) product that can be deployed and production-ready in under an hour.
The company insists that new IoT initiatives need a secure IoT solution to connect physical assets, ingest and blend data from disparate sources at high speeds and then turn it into insights. This, then, is what Hitachi Vantara seeks to deliver.
Read more: BT and Hitachi join forces to develop IoT products
Gartner’s take
Analyst firm Gartner suggests that business units and outside partners are demanding IoT enablement of services and products. But, as its analysts point out, unlike the adoption of other ‘new technologies’, IoT modifies and enhances existing services and products, which are already essential. This makes bringing IoT online without disruption a big ask. They stop just short of suggesting directly that a turnkey software appliance approach could help, but it’s certainly possible to infer that from their statements.
Hitachi IoT Appliance is purpose-built for the IoT, say its makers. From factory floors and solar farms, to water treatment plants and enterprise datacenters, analysis of connected data is helping organizations to optimize their operations.
“The expected result is greater performance and output, efficiency, efficacy and extended life of industrial equipment and capital assets. It simplifies IoT deployments in any number of industrial settings and can be placed at a location of a customer’s choosing-from edge to core-where data privacy, compliance, network limitations and other challenges can be more easily addressed,” said the company, in a press statement.
According to Gaurav Bora, vice president, industrial IoT product management at Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi’s composable IoT platform provides a route to the benefits of Lumada’s advanced data blending and orchestration, artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics capabilities.