Hitachi Vantara retools its storage platform for companies stuck at the AI pilot stage

Hitachi Vantara has announced a set of updates across its Virtual Storage Platform One line and its Hitachi iQ AI portfolio, aimed at the data foundations companies need to run AI in production rather than in pilots 2

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Why the pitch is about pilots

Hitachi Vantara's stated aim is to give organizations a practical path from AI experimentation to production, with control and resilience built in 2

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. The release frames that gap with figures from McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey. Close to nine in ten respondents say their organizations use AI regularly in at least one business function 2

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. Only 44% see AI actually scaling across the enterprise 2

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. The company also cites research from IDC, the technology analyst firm, finding that 89% of organizations worldwide acknowledge some level of data-quality problem 2

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What changed in the storage layer

The lead changes land in VSP One Object, the object storage product meant to serve AI and analytics workloads 2

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. Entry deployments now start at four nodes, with simplified setup, so a company can begin small and grow. The company says improvements in small-object handling support data access up to 5.5x faster for AI, analytics and Amazon S3 workloads 2

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The second change moves analytics to the data instead of the other way round. VSP One Object can query data in open formats such as Iceberg, Parquet, JSON and CSV directly on the storage system 2

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. On those formats, the company says, running queries in place delivers up to 5x faster analytical query performance while using 80% fewer CPUs 2

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. Multisite replication and regional features have also been expanded, aimed at keeping data available and protected during disruptions 2

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The software side

Hitachi iQ, the AI infrastructure layer that sits on VSP One, gets its own additions through Hitachi iQ Studio 2

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. New knowledge sources for retrieval-augmented generation draw on local filesystems and network file systems. A Model Gateway governs access to local and external models, and connectivity through the Model Context Protocol is governed. For iQ Studio, the stated purpose is to make it easier to build AI agents that connect to trusted enterprise data, with access governed rather than open 2

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Octavian Tanase, Hitachi Vantara's chief product officer, framed the launch around AI strategy being inseparable from data strategy 2

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. "As AI becomes part of more business-critical workloads, the infrastructure underneath it has to make it easier to put enterprise data to work," he said 2

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. "With VSP One, we're giving customers a practical way to build the data foundation for AI, bring analytics closer to their data and scale with confidence as demand grows." 2

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