Hitachi Vantara unveils AI agent-building iQ Studio

Hitachi Vantara customers can build, deploy and manage AI agents and applications at scale with the Hitachi iQ Studio agent builder offering.

Hitachi iQ refers to a set of Hitachi AI offerings with iQ Studio being an AI agent stack development environment, an AI factory-type offering, that was revealed in May. It spans base compute and storage infrastructure to applications, through management, development and deployment layers, to AI workflow, frameworks and models, and provides a governed, on-premises and sovereign AI, Nvidia-flavored, toolset environment.

Hitachi Vantara CTO Jason Hardy said: “AI has evolved beyond experimentation, but many organizations still need the right foundation to scale it effectively. With Hitachi iQ Studio, we are making AI more user-friendly and manageable by combining accessible tools with enterprise-grade performance and governance. The result is faster innovation, stronger oversight and a path to scalable, responsible AI.”

It builds on Nvidia’s AI Data Platform reference design and there is an iQ Studio Agent and Studio Agent runtime with links to Nvidia’s NIM and NeMO Retriever microservices. It could extract data from VSP One object and file, vectorize it, and store the vectors in a Milvus vector database. Now iQ Studio is a turnkey integration hub with a no-code and low-code agent builder, and a library of industrial AI templates for prototyping and production across various environments.

Hitachi says iQ Studio provides pre-integrated retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to deliver AI-ready data to agentic AI workloads. It combines RAG pipelines with Model Context Protocol (MCP), ready-to-use algorithms, and pre-built templates, to make it easier for companies without in-house tech expertise to create and deploy their own AI apps and services.

There is a built-in model management system for the deployment and serving of large language and machine learning models locally, within a customer’s own infrastructure. The iQ Studio offering has built-in blueprints for predictive maintenance, operator-skill evaluation and fleet optimization tailored for industrial and enterprise environments.

What iQ Studio cannot do for a customer is to decide what AI agents are needed, whether they are feasible, and how they should be developed and interact. A basic framework might be:

• Look for a RAG-based agent use case in customer support, invoicing and billing or supply chain areas where, currently, people solve messy but fairly simple problems.
• Specify a high-level agent design that can resolve Level-1 support type issues using your internal staff.
• Set internal developer/data engineer/AI agent system integrator person to work using iQ Studio and build and test your agent.
• Set privacy guardrails and audit results.
• Rinse and repeat.

Hitachi says iQ Studio “allows both technical and business teams to create, manage and monitor AI agents that drive measurable outcomes, with features for evaluation, fine-tuning and lifecycle governance. For GenAI and predictive AI applications, Hitachi iQ Studio supports model and prompt management, data curation with feedback loops, scalable deployment and built-in governance and safety.”

Hitachi Vantara will showcase Hitachi iQ Studio at Supercomputing 2025, taking place Nov. 16-21 in St. Louis, Missouri. To find out more about Hitachi’s iQ offerings point your browser at this link.

Hitachi iQ infrastructure, which includes Hitachi Content Software for File (HCSF), is validated through the Nvidia Enterprise Storage Certification program. HCSF has Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP) certification for cloud-native, multi-tenant and service provider environments.

Other storage suppliers with AI factory-type offerings, based on Nvidia’s AI Data Platform reference design, include Cloudian, Cohesity, DDN, Dell, Hammerspace, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage, VAST Data and WEKA. Hitachi Vantara has partnerships with Hammerspace and WEKA.