The Cloud Blog

It’s all about synergy.  Defined, synergy is “the interaction of two or more agents or foces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.”  1+1=3.  That’s exactly what Hitachi Data Systems’ file and content strategy is all about.  Instead of building “product silos” that don’t leverage cross-product capabilities, HDS has brought to market a product portfolio that integrates together.

For instance, much has been written around the benefits of an intelligent tiering strategy.  This goes by many names — Information Lifecycle Management, Hierarchical Storage Management and others — but I just call it common sense.  In the NAS world, for example, it’s common to have significant amounts of static data stored in the same file system alongside a smaller amount of actively-used content.  When it comes time to protect that NAS share, a full backup will capture significant amounts of redundant data (and this phenomenon led to the birth of data deduplication).  Instead, moving that seldomly-used data to an optimized content repository, not only is online access to the data preserved, but unnecessary backups of static data are no longer necessary.  This is precisely why we implemented policy-based intelligent tiering between our Hitachi NAS and Hitachi Content Platform products.  As Michael Hay had discussed earlier, our solution is native — no “glue” software — and leverages complimentary technologies seamlessly.  1+1=3.

Cloud storage is another area of interest, and my colleague Pete Gerr wrote a great blog discussing how the Hitachi Content Platform is a component of our agile cloud strategy.  In particular, we designed the “file and content” component (in this case Hitachi Content Platform) to work hand-in-hand with our core block storage portfolio.  In combination with HCP’s multi-tenancy and namespace management features introduced in release 3.0, HCP can directly address multiple tiers of storage (with different service levels perhaps).  Moreover, an application that leverages the rich REST interface needn’t change — whether the storage is on a local HCP instance serviced by Fibre Channel disk or is a remote instance in a public cloud, the application is transparently unaware.  We make use of this capability to provide some natural solutions.  For example, combining HCP’s versioning and its ability to specify different version retention histories in different content repositories, newer data could be kept on higher performance storage while older data could be kept on lower-cost, lower-performance storage.  Change your mind?  No worries, core storage functions like Tiered Storage Manager allows transparent movement of data from one type of storage to another with zero downtime or disruption.  Complimentary technology leveraged across products; 1+1=3.

In the end, why did we do it this way?  Was it easier?  Not really — building a product in your own bubble is usually the easier way out.  However, the customer pays the price: islands of disparate solutions that need to be glued together with extra software.  Complexity goes up, and in the end, the solution costs more.  We’re the only storage company that can deploy a cohesive file, content and block solution that is fully synthesized: HNAS and HCP completely leverage the virtualized, multi-tier SAN infrastructure that underlies it — and it can embrace third party storage to boot.  1+1=3.