New Technologies in Hitachi Content Platform

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced a set of technologies in the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio that are designed to address the top demands businesses are placing on their IT organizations: a need for extended workforce mobility, and increased productivity from anywhere, anytime and from any device.

As large enterprises transition from traditional IT to private clouds, and from pure on-premises IT to a hybrid cloud – the HCP portfolio also offers the ability to tier data to a public cloud without sacrificing visibility or control of data. This new portfolio consists of HCP, Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere (HCP Anywhere), and Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI).

The new release of HCP introduces adaptive cloud tiering, a feature that allows organizations to intelligently and automatically move data to and from a choice of leading public clouds from Google, Amazon and Microsoft based on changes in demand and policies set by the organization. This capability lets IT create a secure hybrid cloud that has the keys to cloud mobility, complete with a balanced approach to security and cost. It does so by controlling what data is kept in-house and what is stored in the public cloud. With the added elements of HCP Anywhere and HDI, all user-oriented file services can be delivered in a user-friendly way to balance the security and governance requirements of IT. In addition, new capabilities synchronize data across multiple active sites for improved productivity, faster access, and streamlined BC.

“At Oper8, technology is used to solve business problems and gain competitive advantage,” said Mark Owen, COO, Oper8 Pty Ltd (Australia). “Having constant, on-the-go access to important data is critical to making our business run fast and more efficiently, while extending the capability through our HCP-powered cloud storage solutions to the AsiaPac marketplace. By making it easy for our clients to transition to the cloud, we can enable seamless access to data across any device, at any time and any place to support important business decisions.”

Integrated with HCP, HCP Anywhere and HDI give organizations the tools for a more productive mobile and remote workforce by ensuring always-on, secure access to data from any IP-enabled device, including mobile phones, tablets, and remote company locations – all while remaining secure and affordable. HCP Anywhere also acts as a single point of control for user sync and share, and remote office/branch office file services. As a result, mobile workforces can be productive in almost any setting, whether it’s in different company locations with roaming home directories, or any point in between, with file sync and share.

“Garvan seeks to lead the delivery of personalized genome medicine in Australia. Hitachi Content Platform plays a crucial part in helping us transform medicine in this country,” said Dr. Warren Kaplan, Garvan Institute of Medical Research. “We’re not only ensuring security while remaining mobile, but also offering data visibility and collaboration capability to our research community across our organization.“

HCP, HCP Anywhere and HDI are available as software-only offerings. They support the shift toward software-defined architectures and business-defined IT, a model in which business and IT companies jointly develop business and technical goals for a more technology-enabled business.

This shift is increasing, according to a recent IDC InfoBrief that found that 48% of business leaders now influence the technology buying process. The InfoBrief identifies how IT organizations can adapt to and benefit from the shift by effectively partnering with lines of business (LOB) to ensure technology solutions solve specific, measurable business problems.

The brief recommends that when working with business buyers on IT purchases,
IT organizations play specific roles, such as:

Help the LOB to generate insight from data and use insight to drive competitive advantage.
Be a trusted service broker to govern and allow adoption of various private, hybrid, and public cloud offerings.
Become the ‘fast’ organization that the LOB can rely on to accelerate time to market.
The updated HCP portfolio specifically helps to balance the needs of IT and the business. Its benefits include quicker, more reliable access to data, increased workforce productivity, simplified file serving for remote and branch offices, and content mobility to, from and among public and private clouds.

Upgrades and benefits include:

Agility: By mobilizing content across all IP-enabled devices including smart phones and tablets, it helps employees be even more productive. By enabling automated content migration across private and public clouds, HCP helps balance capex and opex spending, and allows on-demand capacity expansion.
Security: By maintaining a robust inventory of data, movement and access is centrally controlled and orchestrated across public, private and hybrid clouds while keeping secure access from multiple devices without compromising security policies in the data center.
Cost Optimization: While providing many new features, the solution remains affordable because it uses cloud topologies, virtual solutions, operational automation, enhanced content distribution, remote system configuration, and affordable public cloud services.
Flexibility and Scalability: Hitachi Cloud Transition Services and Hitachi cloud Services for Content Archiving enable a broad range of deployment and cloud on-ramp capabilities, allowing customers to take full advantage of the flexibility and scalability of HCP. IT gains the ability to tier/archive content to the cloud whether it’s through the Hitachi cloud Solution Packages or other partner cloud architectures – all based on specific customer business requirements.

“This new launch from Hitachi Data Systems strengthens our partner relationship and our enthusiasm that HDS will help us deliver the most enterprise-minded mobility solutions for our customers,” said Jeff Dobbelaere, VP, Mainline Information Systems.

“As priorities and budgets shift in the enterprise, the need for taking a business-defined approach to IT decisions is quickly becoming the norm,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “When coupled with the unique challenges of an increasingly mobile workforce, it is more and more incumbent on IT departments to find technologies that support the realities of business today – from an ever more distributed employee base to an ‘always-on’ expectation when it comes to critical data. Today, technologies must support business – and not the other way around.“

The HCP portfolio is built on a secure object storage solution. It includes archive, backup-free, and hybrid cloud storage for diverse users and applications – all in a single platform. Developed wholly in-house by HDS, the integrated portfolio is easy to set up, manage, maintain and adapt, as business needs change. With the HCP portfolio, IT organizations and cloud service providers can store, share, synchronize, protect, preserve, analyze and retrieve file data from a single system. By avoiding the need for separate systems for each workload, HCP can apply compression and deduplication across a consolidated environment, making it more efficient and cost effective. It also offers a faster time to value for customers, and time to market for service providers.

“For today’s IT organization, it’s critical to deliver technology strategies and solutions in tight alignment with business priorities. We recognize that at HDS, and it’s something we call business-defined IT,” said Brian Householder, COO, HDS. “Today’s increasingly disparate and mobile workforces require trusted data mobility from the data center to the cloud, across a diverse array of devices, machines, sensors and other IP-enabled data sources. Hitachi Content Platform is the most tightly integrated, seamless and secure data mobility offering available today.”

IDC InfoBrief