HDS Roadmap for Information Cloud

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) unveiled its plans for helping customers transform their data into actionable information and harness its power as a strategic asset for business insight and innovation.

To accomplish this, HDS has aligned its product and solutions portfolio around a 3-tiered strategy of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud that builds on existing IT investments to provide a single virtualization platform for all data.

Corporations large and small are being challenged by the growth of data, primarily unstructured data in the form of email, video, images, scientific research, and more. It is estimated that by 2020 there will be a 42x growth in data from 2009, and within the next three years it is estimated that there will be more than 1 billion applications in existence. HDS believes that all data has value and to realize this potential requires data and information to be stored, governed and managed as an asset. Only then can the data be shared, compared, and analyzed more holistically for better insight and innovation.

"We realized early on the tremendous value that businesses could gain by putting disparate pieces of raw data onto a single platform where layers of intelligence could be wrapped around it," said Jack Domme, CEO, HDS. "As the pioneer in storage virtualization, we have years of expertise in developing the fundamental technology that makes this all possible. Through both internal R&D as well as strategic acquisitions, we have built a portfolio that spans the storage, protection and accessibility of data, transforming it into actionable information and providing customers with a 360 degree view to tackle their toughest business challenges. What sets our approach apart from others is that we provide an open framework that enables customers to transition their data centers to information centers at their own pace, leveraging their existing assets without vendor lock-in."

"Transforming data into more intelligent information is a cornerstone of the Hitachi, Ltd. Social Innovation Business, which fuses IT technologies with innovative solutions to improve social infrastructure and usher in a new era of how information technology interacts with people’s lives," said Minoru Kosuge, COO, Platform Business of Information & Telecommunication Systems company, Hitachi, Ltd., and chairman, HDS. "Our intention is to leverage HDSs technology to create social infrastructure solutions that involve cloud services, big data management, machine-to-machine networks, equipment management and control systems. These solutions will bring intelligent information capabilities to the areas of power systems, railways and transportation, urban development and others, ultimately resulting in more efficient, secure and sustainable societies."

"With information exploding exponentially, and companies facing increasing regulatory demands with fewer resources, IT departments can no longer afford to simply function as data custodians," said Benjamin S. Woo, program vice president of storage and big data at IDC. "HDS’ big data vision shows customers a direct understanding that data is multidimensional, and that their solutions need to be as well. Having a converged strategy like this to combat big data provides IT leaders with a platform to get the most value out of their information."

HDS 3-Tiered Strategy
to Transform Data Centers into Information Centers

Infrastructure Cloud: Provides Dynamic Infrastructure
The HDS strategy for infrastructure cloud is to unify server, storage and networking silos using virtualized and converged resources that scale on-demand. This will provide dynamic infrastructure and a single platform for all data that can be the foundation for various cloud services such as storage, infrastructure, platform and even software-as-a-service. HDS is helping customers build infrastructure clouds today with its portfolio of storage, software, services, compute and converged data center solutions. In addition, the company is introducing new Hitachi Cloud Services, Hitachi Cloud Solution Packages and a cloud management portal to help customers manage and control their unstructured data environments and to deliver file and SharePoint services to their users, while reducing backup and restore data volumes and times.

New Hitachi Cloud Services: Provide a fully managed, pay-per-use, private cloud environment on a customer’s premise. This allows customers to offload the management of their file and/or SharePoint data, thereby reducing cost and improving utilization of their IT staff.

New Hitachi Cloud Solution Packages: Provide the technology stack that enables the same use cases as the new cloud services, but delivered as a traditional CAPEX purchase for customers who want to manage and deliver their own cloud environment.

A cloud management portal is included with these new services and solution packages, providing customers with a self-service interface to access bill, payment and charge back information.

Content Cloud: Enables Fluid Content
Building on a single platform for all data, HDS can apply intelligent tools that enable data indexing, search and discovery across data types. Application independence and lifecycle management are keys to achieving a content cloud, which then can be used to provide services such as archiving and content-as-a-service. When content is untethered from the application that created it, data is easier to find, share and repurpose and consequently more valuable. The lifespan of some data can be 30 years or more, while the applications that created the data may only exist for a few years; therefore, it is critical to free the data from the underlying applications and media to enable fluid content with unencumbered, appropriate access and management. The recent acquisition of BlueArc provides a link between infrastructure cloud and content cloud with its expertise in file-based virtualization, built-in intelligent tiering and automated data movement capabilities for unstructured data. This acquisition and integration with the Hitachi file, content and block portfolio enables customers to gain control of their unstructured data with seamless access, search, retention, consolidation and archiving capabilities.

Information Cloud: Facilitates Fast, Sophisticated Insight
Expanding beyond content cloud, HDS is developing technology through its acquisition of ParaScale in August 2010 that will help create an information cloud where information analytics tools and processes can be integrated with the underlining infrastructure. Replicating and recombining previously siloed structured and unstructured data, then applying intelligent analytics will enable organizations to extract and gain more value from their information. The ParaScale technology serves as an element of information cloud by providing a massive scale-out file system that can store and process both structured and unstructured data in parallel and at scale. It offers fast data ingest and integrated data movement and search to serve the needs of big data analytics. HDS will enable information cloud by leveraging the ParaScale technology in addition to Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), NAS from BlueArc and other existing products as well as products in development. An information cloud will connect data sets, reveal patterns across them and bring to surface actionable information and new insights to business users, which can be used to help solve the world’s most pressing challenges in the fields of health and life sciences, energy research, social infrastructure and more.

Use Case: Healthcare Content Cloud
at Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen
One organization that has achieved success implementing the HDS’s strategy for transforming data to information and building a content cloud is Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen. As one of the largest hospitals in Austria with more than 3,500 employees across 4 locations, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen needed a way to make its complex and siloed processes more automated and efficient. It now leverages HDS to consolidate patient information for its lab, radiology and unstructured content management systems, and associated metadata, to provide a consolidated view to its National eHealth application and the hospital’s own clinician portal.

Elmar Flamme, CIO, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen commented: "Information is the lifeblood of our organization. As one of the largest hospitals in Austria, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen creates and stores enormous amounts of data, some of which we need to retain for thirty years or more. In order to extract the value of this data, we need solutions that can serve this data to students, labs, doctors and patients regardless of how it was created or where it is stored. HDS understands and is driving solutions to address our need to free data from its underlying applications and infrastructure, so we can truly harness it as a strategic asset. We chose Hitachi Data Systems cloud infrastructure as the foundation for our content based in the cloud, a virtual, multi-tiered environment where we can assign the appropriate resources based on the business value of the data and quickly search and discover data in an efficient, cost effective, secure and readily understandable format for the user. Ultimately, this allows us to put the right information, in the right hands, at the right time to provide better care, faster."