New object storage and lakehouse capabilities, combined with expanded Hitachi iQ Studio tools, aim to simplify AI deployment while strengthening data governance and infrastructure efficiency.
Hitachi Vantara has expanded its Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) and Hitachi iQ portfolios with new object storage, in-place analytics and AI software capabilities, targeting enterprises seeking to move AI projects from experimentation to production.
A key update to VSP One Object is a smaller four-node starting configuration and simplified deployment, giving organisations a more accessible route to building and scaling AI-ready infrastructure. The company also reports up to 5.5 times faster small-object data access for AI, analytics and S3 workloads, alongside expanded multisite replication and regional capabilities.
The platform now supports analytics directly on open-format data, including Apache Iceberg, Parquet, JSON and CSV. By bringing lakehouse queries closer to where data resides, Hitachi Vantara aims to reduce data movement, duplication and pipeline complexity. The company claims the enhancements can deliver up to five times faster analytical query performance while using 80% fewer CPUs.
The updates also strengthen Hitachi iQ Studio, the software environment for developing and governing enterprise AI applications and agents. New capabilities expand retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) access to structured and unstructured data, including filesystem and NFS knowledge sources, without requiring organisations to move or restructure all their data.
“AI strategy is now inseparable from data strategy. As AI becomes part of more business-critical workloads, the infrastructure underneath it has to make it easier to put enterprise data to work.”
— Octavian Tanase, Chief Product Officer, Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi iQ Studio also adds a Model Gateway for governed access to local and external models, Model Context Protocol connectivity and ServiceNow support. Role-based access, observability and lifecycle management are designed to strengthen oversight of AI applications and agents.
The expanded portfolio addresses a persistent enterprise challenge: turning AI adoption into measurable business outcomes. While nearly nine in 10 respondents to McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey reported regular AI use in at least one business function, only 44% said AI was scaling across the enterprise.
VSP One provides the data foundation for Hitachi iQ, connecting scalable infrastructure with governed data access and AI deployment. Hitachi Vantara will demonstrate the capabilities at Supercomputing 2026, November 16–19, at booth #1429 in Chicago.