Hitachi Vantara debuts AI-ready storage in Singapore

Hitachi Vantara has launched two additional storage products in Singapore as it seeks a larger role in enterprise infrastructure programmes tied to artificial intelligence deployments.

Its Virtual Storage Platform One range now includes VSP One Block High End and VSP One Object in the local market. Hitachi Vantara is positioning the additions as part of a unified data platform for organisations running AI systems in production.

Local demand signals remain strong. Hitachi Vantara's State of Data Infrastructure 2025 report found that 96% of respondents in Singapore were already using AI, while 66% reported success with their AI efforts.

Block storage

VSP One Block High End targets environments with strict requirements for availability and consistency. It sits in the block storage segment, which is widely used for structured data and transactional applications.

Hitachi Vantara described the platform as a foundation for AI workloads and business-critical systems, citing use cases such as high-performance databases, real-time analytics and large AI pipelines.

The company also positioned it for large enterprises with extensive operational dependencies, where deployments often sit alongside financial platforms, customer-facing applications and operational analytics tools.

As AI projects expand beyond experimentation, storage platforms face added pressure from rising data volumes, more frequent access patterns and tighter recovery expectations. In many organisations, AI training and inference run alongside established systems that already consume significant capacity and require predictable performance.

Object storage

VSP One Object focuses on unstructured data, including files, logs, images and other formats often used in AI training datasets. Object storage is a common choice for these datasets because of the scale and variety of information involved.

VSP One Object includes native support for Amazon S3 Tables and integration with Apache Iceberg. Hitachi Vantara said the aim is to bring structured and unstructured data together in a modern data lakehouse design.

The approach enables SQL queries directly on object storage. The product also includes an embedded personally identifiable information service and storage immutability features.

Those security and governance capabilities address growing concern among technology and risk teams managing large, shared AI datasets. Hitachi Vantara's research found that 52% of Singapore respondents believe data complexity makes it harder to detect a security breach.

Mainframe focus

Hitachi Vantara said its VSP One portfolio supports both open systems and mainframe environments. This matters in sectors where core transaction processing remains on older platforms while AI services run across newer infrastructure stacks.

The research also suggested a gap between AI activity and operational readiness. Hitachi Vantara reported that only 23% of Singapore respondents rate their organisations as having strong, industry-leading readiness to achieve return on investment from AI.

In this context, infrastructure spending often shifts from pilot-scale experimentation to long-term operational planning. Buyers tend to prioritise resilience, governance and predictable operations as AI systems begin to influence business decisions, customer services and internal workflows.

Joe Ong, Vice President and General Manager for ASEAN at Hitachi Vantara, linked the Singapore launch to these shifting priorities."Singapore enterprises are moving quickly with AI adoption, but infrastructure foundations need to keep pace," said Joe Ong, Vice President and General Manager for ASEAN, Hitachi Vantara.

Networking layer

Storage suppliers are also increasingly discussing network design alongside capacity and performance. AI systems can generate high volumes of east-west traffic inside data centres, and many enterprises run hybrid setups that connect on-premise storage with cloud services.

Broadcom's Brocade Storage Networking highlighted its Gen 8 Fibre Channel technology alongside the Hitachi Vantara announcement. Fibre Channel remains common in storage area networks used by large enterprises, particularly where low latency and isolation from general-purpose Ethernet networks are priorities.

Broadcom's Martin Skagen said the discussion is moving beyond raw storage performance."Enterprises are reaching a point where storage performance alone is no longer enough," said Martin Skagen, General Manager, Brocade Storage Networking, Broadcom.

VSP One Block High End and VSP One Object are now available in Singapore. Ong added: "Once AI moves from pilots into production, reliability and security become business risks, not just technical concerns."