Techno Musings

My intention with this post is to tie quite a few things together.  The first thing to accomplish is a quick review of the previous chapters.

• Chapter 1 - talked about the emotional hang-ups associated to getting data in the cloud.  So in essence while we can understand intellectually that our data can be protected, until we get it at a visceral level, we don’t really “get it.”
• Chapter 2 - essentially points out that some of the emotional hang-ups are alleviated by the next generation of workers coming into the US over the next decade, nearly 80 million. It’s interesting to note the rough match in China is nearly 300 million people by some estimates. There is not an estimated number for this population in India, but we could guesstimate that the number is in the 100s of millions of people.
• Chapter 3 - asked the question about TCO with the all of the rage being the cheap storage and Backblaze becoming the poster child du jour.  (Note the folks over at Object Matrix objected to my personal assurances of Hitachi’s continued survival.  Nick and I did have a little bit of a “loud” debate but his point of storing content in an open manner is spot on.  This is something that Hitachi has been practicing for sometime even on the block storage side of the house.)

So how does all this come together? Am I making good on my promise that Hitachi can and will help with various cloud activities?

Today we announced our intentions for cloud and the new Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) – which is slated for release later this calendar year.  We are augmenting HCP, which is already a venerable cloud storage contender, to include more features making it even more compelling for private cloud deployments, and we aren’t just stopping there. In the past I’ve mentioned that when EMC announced their intentions with ATMOS(T) they were really joining a crowd of folks who had already done this before — not to mention silently replacing Centera (but shhhh, that’s a secret). What EMC did not do very well, and we are pushing the ball forward on, is direct and indirect application integrations to the cloud.

In the HDS solution, the first integration is via our Sharepoint Plugin, Hitachi Data Discovery for Microsoft Sharepoint.  Since we first GA’ed this product almost two years ago, it used ultra-modern REST access to push files into HCP. We’ve continued pushing the ball forward since then to include persistence of Sharepoint metadata, scheduled retention, etc.  However, if we also look at the Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) models’ 3200, 3100, 3090 and 3080 file content into the cloud, we have what is sometimes referred to as a “cloud on-ramp” which allows applications that have not made the leap to REST to continue using CIFS/NFS, while also taking advantage of getting their data into a private cloud(note that these are topics which I’ve pointed out with more detail in the past here, here and here).  Our systems can be combined so that if customers have made a previous investment in consolidated SANs they can just add another application.  This is not like our competitors who can only offer stove pipes, which has little to no integration.

If you want, you can also use Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) to work with your cloud on-ramp attached to an AMS to support an application that uses NFS.  The on-ramp can then send data over REST to a centralized private cloud on HCP that is attached to a USP-VM and make use of Tiered Storage Manager.  Further, this large centralized cloud is replicating to a bunker site which is made up of HCP 300 all running with embedded disk storage. And, we can do all of this today! So for us, cloud is not necessarily about a single product per se,  it is about making sure that applications which are tuned for the cloud can take advantage of it. It is about deploying a private cloud on top of existing assets, and enabling many capacity optimization features including single instancing, compression, HDP, WAN optimized replication, etc.  This is a key tenant of Hitachi’s strength and where we leave our competitors in the dust!