Data Center Advisors

Over the past couple of years, there has been a lot of discussion about deploying clouds.  In my opinion, what’s been mostly overlooked is providing a comprehensive path for customers to transition from their traditional IT environments to more “cloudy” ones – without leaving their current environments in the “legacy” trash bin.  Today we announced exciting products that deliver some significant technology innovations critical to cloud adoption.

First, our new integrated edge-to-core solution provides a low risk path for customers to move into the cloud at their own pace.  This is something we’ve been focusing on for some time; we can help address customers’ concerns with risk and challenges of adoption. Second, this new integrated edge-to-core solution is made up of a new product, Hitachi Data Ingestor  at the edge, and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) at the core (which is bolstered by some great new features in its 4.0 incarnation). Hitachi Data Ingestor is a dedicated CIFS/NFS on-ramp optimized for HCP.  It provides edge or distributed IT users with intelligently cached, seemingly bottomless, backup-free storage.  Meanwhile, data is moved from the edge into the core HCP, with its massive 40PB of capacity, and where the appropriate data management muscle can be applied – data protection, replication, deduplication, compression, encryption or retention, for example.

Hitachi Content Platform v4 features can be summarized as providing expanded and automated replication, more granular multi-tenancy and chargeback and simplification for customers. So why is this important from a cloud perspective? Simply put, whether an organization is looking to design a private cloud environment to better serve its internal business users or a service provider looking to build an infrastructure to sell their own cloud services, one thing is certain: they need the ability to segregate data securely and manage varying data sets and workloads according to their individual requirements all while capturing and measuring consumption and feature use at a granular level for reporting and/or chargeback.

So what’s most compelling about this offering?

This integrated edge-to-core solution helps cloud service providers and distributed IT organizations, such as those organizations with branch or remote offices, cost effectively deliver storage and IT services to remote consumers without disrupting users or applications.  Because legacy CIFS/NFS is intelligently mapped to the HCP cloud object store, existing applications and infrastructure are preserved.  Together, this offering eliminates the need for tape-based backup and the siloed approach for storing unstructured content at distributed locations.  By leveraging the new simplified and automated replication, multi-tenancy and chargeback capabilities within Hitachi Content Platform v4, organizations can streamline, centralize and simplify the management of data generated in distributed environments.

Don’t just take my word for it, read more about it for yourself here, here and here.