HDS Delivering Object Storage Portfolio With Content Intelligence Capabilities

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., announced Hitachi Content Intelligence (HCI), an addition to its Hitachi Content Portfolio (HCP), making it an object storage portfolio with search and analytics capabilities.

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This intelligence solution rounds out the HCP portfolio, which already offers a integrated cloud-file gateway and enterprise file sync and sharing, and continues to improves organizations’ ability to strategically manage data. More than 1,700 customers have adopted HCP as a component in their digital transformation journey. With HCI, these customers can transform data into relevant business information and deliver it to the right people, when it matters most.

HCI addresses the challenges of exploring and discovering relevant, valuable and factual information across the growing number of data producers and siloed repositories that plague organizations today. By aggregating multi-structured data, it enables insights to be surfaced faster, data management and governance to be more complete, and to understand the distribution of organizational data based on its value to the business.

“HCP has transformed the way we handle compliance investigations and cut the time needed for discovery searches from weeks to hours. HiCI is now an important and necessary part of our global compliance monitoring, discovery, and intervention architecture,” said Walter Hendricks, BA, CCEP-I, business change manager, discovery and intervention – compliance expertise and operations, Rabobank.

Rabobank serves more than ten million customers in 47 countries, employs over 51,000 people worldwide and, like all financial institutions, is subject to regulations in each of the countries where it operates. The company needed a solution that would be efficient, flexible and comprehensive for current and future compliance investigations. With the firm’s solution, the bank now gives approved users all the data they need at their desks without having to ask for IT support.

Customers such as Precision Discovery, Inc., and the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) have turned to the company to solve their most critical digital transformation initiatives. With the integration of HCI, long-standing HCP portfolio customers are able to analyze their growing amounts of structured and unstructured data without having to turn to a third party.

The National Archives and Records Administration uses HCP and HCI to store, preserve and make accessible their largest and most prominent electronic records collections to include emails, photos, documents and dozens of source applications that have been converted to open formats.

“We selected HCI over competing software-based implementations or building our own, due to its use of a flexible software developers kit and its integration with HCP. In addition, we know the architecture will not constrain what we want to do with the platform,” said Jason vanValkenburgh, VP, Hitachi Consulting Corporation, which provides project management and application development for the project with HDS Federal and prime contract holder, ViON Corporation.

“Precision Discovery recognizes the value in HCP with HCI in solving the parts of the litigation lifecycle that are the most difficult to manage. This platform allows us to build custom solutions that greatly reduce customer costs, increase visibility and manage risk. None of this is possible without the intelligence, extensibility and raw power of HCI,” said Howard Holton, CIO, Precision Discovery.

Scott Baker, senior director, emerging technologies HDS, said: “For today’s enterprises, data is the most strategic asset, and connecting the right people to the right data in a timely and meaningful way is critical to staying relevant and competitive in their market segment. HCI lets customers organize, transform and package organizational data into factual information, making it invaluable to the business.”

With HCI organizations can:

• Improve employee productivity and efficiency by creating a standard and consistent enterprise search process across the entire IT environment.

• Empower all levels of the organization with a self-service and intuitive out-of-the-box data exploration experience that includes support for detailed queries and ad hoc natural language searches.

• Discover new insights faster through automated extraction, classification, enrichment and categorization of all of their data.

• Minimize business risk and exposure from data that is inaccessible, dark, or has been lost, while improving the operational effectiveness of the business.

• Optimize existing infrastructure by identifying infrequently accessed data and automate its relocation to a lower-cost object storage tier.

Key features of HCI include:

• Centralizes organizational data and transforms it into valuable and relevant business information.

• Connects to and aggregates multi-structured data across heterogeneous data silos and different locations.

• Offers flexible deployment options that include physical, virtual, or hosted (public or private cloud).

• Handles scalability and availability with support for distributed and dynamic cluster sizes that can burst to more than 10,000 instances.

• Maintains data sensitivity by ensuring that only authorized users have access to specified results with integration to authentication services, document-level security controls, and granular access policies.

• Delivers personalized and self-service results that are tailored to the individual user or group that accesses the data.

• Includes extensibility with published application programming interfaces that support customized data connections, transformation stages, or building new applications.

• Deploys with an intuitive workflow designer, administration tools, and a guided data exploration and search application.

With HCI, organizations can connect to and aggregate data silos, transform, and enrich the data as it’s processed, and provide analytics across all the data stored on the platform – making it an object storage portfolio with integrated cloud gateway, file sync and share, and data search and analytics capabilities.

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Content Platform Portfolio
The HCP portfolio offering that allows organizations to bring together object storage, file sync and share, cloud storage gateways, and sophisticated search and analytics to create a tightly integrated, simple and smart cloud storage solution. HCP provides massive scale, multiple storage tiers, powerful security, cloud capabilities, broad protocol support, multi-tenancy and configurable attributes for each tenant, all backed by firm’s reliability. Designed to reliably hold data for long durations, HCP carries built-in data protection mechanisms and is designed to fluently evolve with storage technologies without the need for tape backup. Furthermore, it is able to address a range of challenges through a thriving community of third-party software partners. HCP eliminates the need to maintain separate systems for each workload. Customers enjoy faster time to value and service providers accelerate time to market by eliminating the hassles of do-it-yourself integration.