HDS Partners With Data Islandia

Hitachi
Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and tonly provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, announced it has signed a global partnership with Data Íslandia to
offer archival data management services—enabling multinational
organisations to address the growing management, compliance and
environmental burden of exploding data volumes.

Data Íslandia has established facilities in Iceland with 100% green
energy to offer international archival services for sensitive digital
information with an emphasis on scalability, security and privacy.
Using technology from Hitachi, Data Íslandia manages archived data for
optimal compliance, risk containment, governance and operational
advantage. The facilities are powered completely by geothermal and
hydroelectric energy, making Data Íslandia’s services the greenest in
the world.

“Organizations are focused on making their data centers more
efficient, but virtualizing six-month old information, which is
effectively digital toxic waste, is a very poor use of resources.
Instead, they should be looking to completely remove this data from the
corporate network,“ said Sol Squire, Executive Member of the Board of
Directors and CBDO for Data Íslandia. “We offer an ideal solution, with
our geographic, regulatory and environmental advantages combining to
offer very stable long-term rates on archival storage.”

Analysts estimate that up to 70% of data stored by organizations is
more than six months old. Much of this data must be retained for
compliance purposes but it is generally stored inefficiently, offers
very little business value stored on tape, and takes up a great
proportion of the available power, space and management resources. By
removing archived data from the corporate network and cost-effectively
storing it on disk, organizations benefit from reduced power
consumption and cooling, increased space, better compliance with
corporate regulations and far better use of resources.

“Our services are exceptionally scalable and cost-effective with an
operational stability that is ideal for decades-long retention
policies. Hitachi’s technology advances for the high-volume enterprise
market, along with its strategic vision and anticipation of future
legal and governance imperatives, make it the ideal technology
partner,” said Squire.

Data Íslandia’s facilities benefit from Iceland’s lower real estate,
telecommunications and energy costs. These reduced operational costs
combined with Hitachi’s archiving technology means that Data Íslandia
can offer disk-based archiving as a cost-effective alternative to tape.
The benefit of this is that customers can access their archived data
via a high-speed connection and use it for business intelligence, fraud
prevention and other information management activities.

After assessing other solutions available on the market, Data
Íslandia selected Hitachi because its solutions were the most scalable,
flexible and latency resilient. Hitachi’s Services Oriented Storage
Solutions strategy and its focus on software and management rather than
hardware was consistent with Data Íslandia’s aim of providing
decades-long archival services to customers without locking them into
proprietary technologies that may quickly become outdated or
superceded, effectively rendering their data useless.

Data Íslandia will use the Hitachi Content Archive Platform as the
core digital indexing and archival platform, and will utilise Hitachi’s
flagship storage system, the Universal Storage Platform™ V, for the
storage of the archived data. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform
offers numerous benefits including native content archiving,
sophisticated policies data lifecycle management and compliance,
petabyte scalability and the ability to migrate seamlessly across
generations of storage technologies using the virtualization
capabilities of the USP V.

“Organizations are fast running out of room in their data centers
due to the explosive growth of data volumes. Compounding this is the
fact that stricter corporate governance controls and new regulations
are creating a data management nightmare,” said Hu Yoshida, CTO,
Hitachi Data Systems. “Data Íslandia has created an elegant solution to
many of the most critical challenges facing businesses today, allowing
them to not only alleviate their own data centre burdens but to in fact
make far better use of valuable business data. They also contribute
positively to the environment by making use of the world’s most
environmentally friendly data archival service.”

In addition to providing data archival services, Data Íslandia and
Hitachi also help customers develop responsive data policies that meet
evolving regulatory and risk management pressures. Coupling that policy
suite with appropriate cost-effective technologies and processes means
that organizations can harmonize the effects of decades of inconsistent
legacy management, reducing risk and providing a positive return on
investment.

Data Íslandia

Hitachi Data Systems Corp.