Claus's Blog

At Fall SNW, HDS announced version 3 of our Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to expand on our originally named Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP). Why drop the “A”? Well, because it’s no longer just about the archiving. Afterall, the industry has been archiving data for decades so there’s nothing new there.

For more background, check out these blog posts announcing HCP from Hu and Michael in October. And back in April, I posted on the ever expanding capabilities of the HC(A)P. Fast forward to now, we GA’d HCP a couple of weeks ago on November 20th, so all the new features are available and shipping to our customers. Now!

So a couple of days ago, EMC announced their newest enhancements to Centera, and I was left asking myself “What was that all about?” It was the same feeling I had when InVista was announced (man, was that ever a flop!), and even the VMax announcement. But to the point, EMC’s announcement was nothing more than saying they can centrally manage multiple Centeras, even over distance. Well, that’s a good step forward. Really, it is. But I’ve chided EMC relentlessly over the years on their propagation of what I call “buckets of storage”: the DMX bucket, the Clariiiiion bucket, the Centera bucket, the Celera bucket, and the Atmos bucket (another “what was that all about?”) so this announcement doesn’t really address what I see as a major weakness in the overall EMC strategy, namely, lack of integration.

But back to the Hitachi Content (don’t-call-it-archive) Platform, in addition to consolidating many tiers of storage into a simple platform, having amazing data discovery capabilities and secure multi-tenancy features, and containing all the expected compliancy, encryption, and retention requirements you’d expect, it also can integrate with multiple different storage systems. I’m not going to repeat the announcement material here, but suffice it to say that the two announcements expose the different tacks that HDS and EMC are on when it comes to, well, archiving. We believe in delivering even more intelligent functions to enhance an already solid and integrated content platform; EMC is content to deliver small-step solutions without addressing the much larger issue of how this all ties together. Too bad, but we’re having fun with HCP and our customers are “getting it”.