Data Center Advisors

A while back there was a request about better defining what Hitachi is doing in this space.  I figured that I would come back to that point and talk about what we offer today.  There are four major capabilities that I want to point out over two posts.

Data Discovery Suite V1.2 and High Performance NAS Platform

The first is that just like Hitachi has done since the USP-V class system we’ve been adding support for storage systems other than Hitachi’s.  Specifically in the area of file system virtualization the eXternal Volume Link (XVL) feature allows HNAS to address NFSv3 shares on  HNAS, HCAP and NetApp systems for example, to use them as externally attached file storage.  Further the XVL feature allows content to be migrated to these systems and HDDS plays the role policy engine.  (For a good idea on how you can set up migration policies on HDDS please take a look at the following ESG report.)  The model that we’ve developed between HDDS and HNAS is intentionally very similar to Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager and the USP-V, in that the virtualization and data movement engines are within the storage controller and the policy entrance point is within software which is orthogonal to the data path.  This is important because it was what customers were asking for: file system virtualization and migration as a feature of a NAS device and not a completely separate product or software.  In fact one of the original Acopia customers stated that they would throw Acopia out in a second if someone would embed file system virtualization and migration into the NAS devices as a feature.  As hinted at there is intentional alignment here to help  customers  leverage their knowledge and skills developed on our USP-V model to the File and Content services model. (Heck we’ve even gone so far as to borrow language and models from Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager so that skills previously learned can be reused.)

Second is  HDDS support for NetApp file storage devices.  As previously mentioned above already NetApp can be the target for migration by HNAS and it can now be searched as well.  That is right my fellow readers just like our most recent announcements about the IT Operations Center we’ve been steadily branching out and developing products where an existing Hitachi footprint is not required.  (Note that doesn’t mean that the NetApp device can migrate data as it doesn’t have a migration engine.)  Support for NetApp was strongly requested by our customer base for HDDS.  This is important because it supports two adoption patterns.  The first is for customers that have the namespace sprawl problem with many NetApp filers.  Users can deploy HDDS to get an understanding of what they have on their filers within a single view.  Further the use cases like single/multiple file restore, discovery,  ACLs/POSIX permissions filtering, etc. are all possible just with HDDS for NetApp.  Second is for those customers that have both HNAS and NetApp or HCAP and NetApp on the floor and want to combine them with a single federated search view.  In the case of those customer that have HNAS and NetApp they can turn their NetApp filers into legacy searchable file storage targets for HNAS to protect their original investment until the depreciate schedule runs out, subsequently retiring the NetApp filer or continuing to use it as paid for legacy NAS.

Continued in part 2