CTC Provides Hyper Converged Solution Utilizing VMware vSAN™

ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (Satoshi Kikuchi, President & CEO; headquartered in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; hereinafter "CTC") will today begin offering VMware HCI, a highly scalable hyper converged solution utilizing VMware vSAN™, a Software Defined Storage Platform enabling sophisticated storage functions by software. This solution offers a hyper converged infrastructure^*1 that enables the reinforcement of virtualized environments without requiring large-scale storage and time-consuming configuration, flexibly supporting systems small and large. The price for the smallest configuration with three servers starts from 20 million yen. CTC will aim at one billion yen in sales over the three years.

Recently, in step with the popularization of virtualization technology and big data, key requirements for storage, which stores data, have become diversified in areas such as processing speed, scalability, and cost advantages. Hyper converged infrastructure, which enables shared storage for virtualized environments with hard disks and Solid State Drives (SSD) built into servers, can reduce the initial investment cost, attracting attention as a virtualization solution that is flexibly extendable in accordance with working conditions.

VMware HCI is the hyper converged infrastructure provided by VMware, Inc., built centered on VMware vSAN, which is software to manage built-in disks of servers as shared storage for virtualization environments, combined with VMware vSphere® and VMware® vCenter™, which manage virtualization environments. Integrating vSAN, which manages storage, into the management functions of virtualized servers allows for the building of an easy-to-operate, flexibly scalable, failure-tolerant storage for virtualized environments, without the expertise regarding dedicated storage.

The hyper converged solution provided by CTC is a verified model, combining VMware HCI provided based on the strategic partnership with VMware, Inc., servers from Cisco Systems Inc., and Dell EMC, CTC's proprietary software, and other components. CTC provides comprehensive services alongside products, ranging from construction support including configurations on virtualization and networks, through to unified maintenance support of software and hardware. Even if resources including storage become insufficient for the built virtualization environment, the solution can respond by adding servers, making it possible to provide the necessary and sufficient environments for usage conditions.

Avail-I, which automates operations associated with system failures, is an option product equipped with CTC's proprietary developed software. Including EIMANAGER, document information management system for enterprises, CTC will continue to expand its software and hardware to provide hyper converged solutions in the future.

In addition to its extensive experience building large-scale virtualization environments, CTC has already constructed a system utilizing vSAN. CTC has templates to offer in which know-how on configuration and operation is condensed, contributing to customers' efficient management tasks.