Data Center Advisors

In the last post I made the case that Sharepoint is an Enterprise 2.0 platform.  As to how Hitachi can assist with appropriate infrastructures, well enter two of Hitachi’s products: the Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP) and Hitachi Data Discovery for Microsoft Sharepoint.  Pointedly, we assist with the problems associated to the ever increasing number of Sharepoint sites and duplicated capacity between them specifically.  Users may share and duplicate all of the data they like through sneaker-net means — meaning by using a USB drive or email — and the data can be stored in a centralize Web 2.0 style repository.  Within this repository users can be assured that their data is well preserved for the long haul, protected from disasters, and has privacy protection.  While the IT organization can optimize their infrastructure for cost, reduce or eliminate backups, and ensure that the data meets the rigors required for compliance or eDiscovery.   In essence it is like having your cake and eating it too: IT self service within a consolidated IT infrastructure.

The specifics of how this is accomplished are as follows:

• The HDD-MS Basic webpart is installed into one or many Sharepoint sites
• An HCAP system is registered within HDD-MS instances
• A “Policy Folders” are created in place of a traditional Document Library within Sharepoint sites, including associated movement schedules and rules related to retention
• Users can then interact with the “Policy Folder” as if it were a normal Document Library by checking in content through a web browser or via Microsoft Office directly
• Content is then moved into HCAP, via REST, on a scheduled basis with the required policy with things like retention being enacted on HCAP during the ingestion phase. The actual content within Sharepoint is then replaced with a URL which points to the physical object which resides on HCAP
• All content within HCAP is then capacity reduced using two compliance safe approaches: Single Instancing and Compression
• Further the IT group can optionally decide to not back up the Sharepoint content in the HCAP system.  This is due to the content authentication and protection policies as well as the possibility of wide area replication of the content to a remote site

Once the content is placed into HCAP things like the HCAP search module will afford the legal organization within a company the ability to search simultaneously across the content from all Sharepoint sites that have moved their content into HCAP, and perform optional operations like litigation hold.  Beyond that point this approach helps Sharepoint sites scale to larger capacities because the BLOB content is no longer stored within the embedded MS-SQL database.  So like I said this is like having your cake and eating it too, and the best thing is that our bakery already has this cake ready for your consumption.  You can buy all of this today not sometime in the future!