Hitachi Data Systems Revamps Content Cloud Approach

In an effort to help organizations handle the growth of unstructured data, Hitachi (News - Alert) Data Systems Corporation (HDS) has made new enhancements to its object store, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and its cloud on-ramp, Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI).

The upgrades are intended to reduce overall costs by helping organizations better manage unstructured data growth, ensure content security in shared storage environments and reduce the complexity and inefficiency in traditional, cloud computing and distributed IT environments, according to Miklos Sandorfi, chief strategist, Hitachi Data Systems (News - Alert).

“Organizations are looking for new, innovative approaches to deal with the expansive growth of unstructured content and extract the full value of their data,” Sandorfi said in a company statement. “Our content cloud approach allows organizations to store billions of data objects and use intelligence layers to index and search the data independently of the application that created it. The data is available across devices, anytime and anywhere. By deploying HCP and HDI, customers will cut costs in managing, storing and accessing data and build a foundation for the information cloud.”

Using replication, automatic failover, erasure coding and non-disruptive hardware and software upgrade, HCP and HDI provide high availability from the edge to the core, according to Sandorfi, allowing administrators to respond to issues before they threaten service level agreements (SLA).

Content can be distributed to HDI and “pinned” to the remote location, ensuring local access performance to a consistent set of data and reducing bandwidth consumption and costs. In addition, HDI offers high availability configurations to ensure continuous operation for service provider customers or remote and branch offices in distributed, private IT environments.

Together, HCP and HDI help organizations and cloud service providers lower costs and complexities associated with storing large and rapidly growing volumes of unstructured data, while enabling fluid content with fast access and data life cycle management.

Among the new features intended to improved operational efficiency to lower costs are the following:

• HCP leverages spin-down disk support in HUS to lower costs for large scale unstructured data storage and to reduce energy consumption.
• HCP works with almost any application with support for HTTP/REST, CIFS, NFS, Symantec (News - Alert) Enterprise Vault Streamer and more.
• HDI VMware appliance support for high availability provides a lower cost alternative to meet high availability requirements with less infrastructure and complexity.
• New content audit services discover and classify content and provide recommendations for improved efficiency and lower cost.

HCP can supports thousands of tenants and tens of thousands of namespaces per system, reducing costs per tenant and maximizing utilization. Its improved component and performance monitoring and email alerting help proactively address any bottlenecks or hardware issues before they impact SLAs, Hitachi officials said.

“By leveraging the secure multi-tenancy and compliance capabilities of HCP, with file serving on-ramp HDI, Acens is now a leading cloud services provider in Spain,” said Manuel Gomez, high level product manager at Acens. “Our cloud services have clear differentiation from our competitors’ simple and cheap online storage by providing feature-rich cloud storage to satisfy the needs of customers that require higher levels of service, availability, reliability and privacy and legislative compliance.”