What can HDS do for you?
by Miki Sandorfi on Apr 24, 2012
I’m very pleased and excited to be part of a company that has a compelling vision, focused on solving customers’ business challenges, AND continues to execute toward that vision in a steady drumbeat of announcements, enhancements and new product introductions. Today, we made two significant announcements (unified and cloud), both highlighting our commitment and serving as proof-points to our vision and journey to the information cloud. Before I go any further, let’s briefly recap on that vision.
In October 2011, we announced our 3-tier strategy—starting from infrastructure cloud to provide more dynamic infrastructure, then layering content cloud to enable more fluid content, and then finally building to information cloud to facilitate more sophisticated insight. You can read more about that here.
Today’s Hitachi Unified Storage announcement supports our vision by providing a platform that underpins it, granting customers unified and seamless access to all resources, data, content and information. This unified architecture provides a single pool, so that the whole capacity can be managed from one place, improving utilization, simplifying management and lowering costs for our customers. To achieve this, we are bringing to market a unified platform, as well as a unique, extensible management framework to provide a single way to store, manage and protect all data: block, file and object.
Now, in order to manage the massive growth of information, with limited resources all while bubbling up the trends and insights gleaned across previously siloed datasets, it’s critical to free data from its originating application and underlying media. This is where object storage comes in (enter Hitachi Content Platform – HCP). HCP provides a different way of storing information. It stores information as objects, which is the data, plus metadata (data that describes the data itself). This approach unleashes a whole host of interesting things that can be done with that data. For example, the management of that data can be automated based on what the data is, how it was created, who created it, who can access it, what service levels should be assigned, how it should be protected, when it should be deleted, and the list goes on and on. This also means we can index, search and discover across all data within the object store. This is critical to finding data for insight, reuse and action.
Today’s content cloud announcement includes new features across Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Data Ingestor as well as a new Content Audit service. The new capabilities provide greater scale within a singular architecture with significant increases in tenants and namespaces, storage density and broad protocol support, more granular visibility and control by providing more intelligent queriability of the data, along with more comprehensive access controls and finally improved operational efficiency achieved through support of spin down, simplified installation, enhanced monitoring and online upgrades. These new features and enhancements are targeted towards customers looking to centralize the data within their organization, within remote or branch offices, or service providers looking for a robust foundation in which to build and deliver their own reliable and profitable cloud services.
This is indeed an exciting set of announcements, enhancements and introductions, but don’t just take my word, take a look at the details of what’s included in unified, covered by Hu Yoshida here, and more to come on HCP/HDI from Michael Hay and Ken Wood, stay tuned!
