HDS Unveiled New Agile Cloud Solutions

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced the new portfolio of agile cloud technologies to accelerate and simplify the adoption of enterprise cloud computing environments. Specifically, the portfolio delivers the industry’s most integrated set of computing resources to create a single pool of virtualized block, file and content storage to support the diverse uses that are evolving in cloud computing today, and enables organizations to adopt cloud services at their own pace.

As part of the cloud offerings, Hitachi Data Systems also unveiled the new Hitachi Content Platform that provides essential security, reliability and multitenancy for cloud infrastructures.

“Cloud computing enables a real and achievable alternative to traditional long term approaches to computing capacity consumption and investment. However, current cloud methodologies are not in tune with the heterogeneous realities many organizations face today, creating the same poorly utilized data silos that organizations tried to avoid through cloud computing efforts,” said Miklos Sandorfi, chief strategist, File and Content Services, Hitachi Data Systems. “Our unique approach delivers a dynamic cloud environment that virtualizes all existing storage resources into a single, agile service oriented infrastructure that reduces storage costs, mitigates risk and is easily managed in the face of changing demands.”

“For many organizations, ‘cloud’, whether talking about public, private, or hybrid, means that they want to take advantage of a better run data center and better manage rapid information growth,” said Richard Villars, vice president of Storage and IT Executive Strategies, IDC. “Solutions like Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Content Platform that provide integrated, scalable, and open storage resources for virtualized and content intensive applications will play an important role in helping companies achieve their real business goals.”

Hitachi Cloud Customer Benefits
With sophisticated storage virtualization, Hitachi Data Systems enables a secure, multitenant environment that ensures privacy among various constituents within a shared infrastructure that can be managed from a single command suite. Supporting a variety of protocols and third party technology, enterprises and service providers can further leverage existing investments in hardware and software and allow legacy devices to inherit cloud attributes, thereby preventing cloud from becoming just another silo and eliminating the need for a complete refresh or update of hardware and software or the need to rewrite applications. As a result, Hitachi Data Systems cloud solutions enable enterprise customers to choose the best possible technologies to address their challenges at their desired pace and budget resources.

By offering an integrated set of cloud solutions, Hitachi Data Systems can deliver an agile cloud infrastructure that empowers customers to look at their existing IT infrastructure in new ways, enabling them to:

• Provide efficient IT management and increase productivity through automation
• Meet changing performance, availability and storage needs
• Ensure security in a shared environment
• Cost effectively improve data protection
• Make information easy to locate and use, anywhere, at any time

“Hitachi’s enterprise and mid-tier storage met our requirements to create a scalable, multi-tiered environment for our increasing demand to provide content to multiple platforms,” said Diane Tryneski, senior vice president, Studio and Broadcast Operations, HBO.

“With Hitachi Data Systems, we were able to consolidate and better manage our storage environment. The addition of a Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM to our long-standing investment in modular storage improved our storage utilization and made the environment easier to manage by eliminating storage silos for our different applications. By virtualizing our existing storage with Hitachi Data Systems, we were able to get more out of our existing storage investments and create a more agile infrastructure to better adapt to our changing needs,” said Basil Kanno, Chief Information Officer of PowerNet Global, an integrated communications provider and Hitachi Data Systems customer.

"Hitachi Data Systems has long been a world leader in high capacity and performance storage solutions. At Telstra, we realized that becoming an aggregator of storage volumes, aka a cloud enabler, we would need to handle high capacities and at the same time ensure customers performance in order support the value proposition of ‘in the network’ technology. Hitachi Data Systems has provided flexible and scalable storage solutions as part of our overall ‘cloud computing’ service offering," said Mark Pratley, general manager, Managed ICT Products of Telstra, an integrated telecommunications company and Hitachi Data Systems customer.

“Digi-Data offers a platform that uniquely addresses online storage demands, rapidly meets changes in business requirements and drastically reduces costs. Leveraging the new Hitachi cloud infrastructure, this solution delivers seamless file sharing, backups and multimedia streaming to desktop and mobile devices, while mitigating potential privacy and reliability concerns," said Dennis Cindrich, Chief Executive Officer of Digi-Data Corporation, a lsoftware-as-a-service provider and Hitachi Data Systems partner.

New Hitachi Content Platform
and Cloud Enabling Technologies
Hitachi Data Systems best-in-class Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and award-winning Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage systems provide a single, virtual pool of storage with a host of key cloud attributes which can be provisioned against all types of IT services on demand. These services can be delivered via a number of fully integrated solutions including the recently announced Hitachi NAS Platform for file services, the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite for collaboration and search and the new Hitachi Content Platform for cloud storage, archiving, business continuity, creating content depots, consolidation and many other services.

The Hitachi Content Platform also includes a number of advanced features that enable the solution to address a variety of challenges beyond the long term preservation of business critical information, such as:

• Enabling Customers to Evolve Cloud at Their Own Pace: The new Hitachi Content Platform will serve enterprise content storage needs as well as public and private cloud environments within a single optimized cluster. Customers can adopt the cloud technologies based on their business needs, and they do not need to purchase another storage island for their cloud solution.
• Segregating Data Securely: By providing a multitenant architecture, object versioning, retention and disposition services, encryption, immutability, high availability, search capabilities and much more, Hitachi Content Platform helps IT organizations securely segregate data within different namespaces to prevent unauthorized access and provide different service level agreements and features for different data sets.
• Intelligently Tiering Data: Customers will be able to manage data growth from higher tier storage to a storage platform with features and capabilities that go beyond the traditional ‘archive’ and enable intelligent content storage for a number of use cases.

Hitachi Data Systems will further extend its cloud offerings to incorporate Hitachi BladeSymphony technology as well as other leading server platforms to deliver complete integrated and secure public and private cloud infrastructure solutions.