Hitachi eyes cloud JVs in Australia

Hitachi Data Systems wants to enter a number of joint ventures with service providers to offer a hosted application or cloud service based on the vendor's new ‘unified compute platform'.

The platform, launched overnight, included server, storage, networking and orchestrator systems management components.

A number of pieces came out of an existing relationship with Microsoft, including Hyper-V and System Center.

The hardware side would also include HDS' Blade Symphony line, previously available in Japan but not in Australia.

Director of presales and solutions Adrian De Luca would not be drawn on how much the platform cost or what financial contribution would be expected from potential joint venture partners.

"We'll go to market together as business partners," he said.

"It needs to be done as a joint venture based on taking a shared profit and shared risk."

He said the solution was "turnkey". It gave end users, among other things, application templates and a self-service portal where they could manage changes in their environments.

Hitachi was not the only firm to offer a unified computing platform. Cisco was among other vendors to have also launched a similar platform in the past year and has partnered with data storage vendor EMC and virtualisation software vendor VMware to sell a complete solution to the market. Vendors such as HP, IBM and Dell are also assembling their products along similar lines.