Open Network Featured Article

Hitachi Ltd (News - Alert). has joined the OpenDaylight Project at the silver level, the organizations have announced.

A Tokyo-based company, Hitachi is a behemoth that plays in the automotive system, construction machinery, health care, IT, telecom, and other areas. It reported $81.3 billion in consolidated revenues in fiscal 2014, which ended March 2015. The company also has a subsidiary called Hitachi Data Systems (News - Alert) that builds big data analytics, content, and cloud solutions.

Don Keller, senior vice president of business development at Hitachi, says the company decided to move into network functions virtualization at the end of 2012. In a recent interview he talked about how Hitachi has really divided up its functionality into different virtual elements including billing, signaling, and subscriber control. The company, which also offers a virtualized evolved packet core for cellular service providers moving to 4G, also promotes the fact that its NFV solutions enable carriers to easily scale as required.

"OpenDaylight, whose platform can centralize control and integration management in heterogeneous environments including physical and virtual network, can change network configuration quickly and dynamically. Thus, it enables user to deploy flexible IT infrastructure along with a changing business environment. This is very important in today's rapidly changing business situation," said Susumu Okuhara, senior director of OSS Solution Center, Information & Telecommunication Systems Company at Hitachi Ltd.

In a recent Transforming Network Infrastructure article, Compuverde founder and CEO Stefan Bernbo notes that Hitachi Data Systems and Pentaho have joined forces to deliver a software-defined platform for big data.

“The combined effort yielded a software-defined platform for big data operations, one that will serve as an alternative to those currently offered by major names like Cisco, IBM and Oracle (News - Alert),” Bernbo explains. “Dubbed the Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform 400, the system starts with convergence with Pentaho's Enterprise Platform. Since Pentaho is part of the Hitachi Group, as is HDS, the two are uniquely positioned to work well together. Having the Enterprise Platform in play allows the Hyper Scale-Out Platform 400 to combine compute management, storage management, and virtualization all in one unit.”