Data Center Advisors

Today HDS made an important announcement supporting our commitment to cloud, and it came in two parts.

First, we announced and provided details behind our vision of where cloud is headed: from infrastructure towards content and then information cloud.

Second, we announced the availability of new Hitachi Cloud Services that customers can leverage to reduce the TCO of unstructured data in their environment while putting themselves on the path to content cloud.

Let me explain a little about these two parts of our announcement.

The first part is giving further insight into what is driving our development, acquisitions, and delivery around cloud services.  The graphic below shows at a high level what we are describing:

We view the infrastructure cloud as a basic set of capabilities that allow us to solve bigger problems—the infrastructure cloud is a set of tools in a toolbox.  In the content cloud, we focus on leveraging the dynamic infrastructure enabled by the infrastructure cloud and add capabilities to liberate data so that it can be freely used and re-used: it enables fluid content.  We have a great example of this in practice with our customer Klinikum Wels (you can see the case study here).  Finally, this leads to the information cloud, where we can leverage the dynamic infrastructure cloud and the liberated data in all forms (structured, unstructured, semi-structured) from the content cloud to drive towards sophisticated analysis and insight.

The second part of the announcement focuses on new Hitachi Cloud Services that are now available and help customers build towards the content cloud while realizing immediate benefits in the infrastructure cloud.

These solutions are focused on TCO reduction for unstructured data, and are delivered with self-service and pay-per-use capabilities.  Here you can continue with already-deployed traditional NAS and complement it with a cloud solution for 30% or more TCO reduction (file tiering); augment or replace NAS filers with a backup-free, bottom-less cloud implementation that still “looks and feels” like traditional NAS but is deployed with next-generation cloud technology; and complement SharePoint environments by offloading a bulk of content into the private cloud.

Because customer choice is extremely important, we have designed all of these new solutions to be modularly delivered: customers can purchase these offering as cloud packages and build their own cloud around it.  They can optionally enable self-service and billing/chargeback by electing to deploy the management portal.  Or we can provide fully managed solutions including a true OpEx pay-per-use consumption model with no upfront capital expense to the customer.

Regardless of deployment choice, these solutions put the customer on the path towards content and information cloud.  Customers get common, policy-driven data lifecycle management; search and retrieval of their data any time, from anywhere; and a foundation to provide data abstraction from the application that generated the data.  Information is the lifeblood of any organization, and we are helping deliver that value to our customers.

Want to read more about our Cloud Roadmap? Visit our bit.ly bundle here: http://bitly.com/pCt5Gk