NEXT: Hitachi Vantara Updates Hitachi Content Platform Portfolio

Hitachi Vantara Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., at NEXT 2018 announced updates to the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio.

The updates extend data governance, optimize for cloud and modernize file services to help organizations govern and protect their data in an increasingly complex multicloud environment. These enhancements to the HCP portfolio help deliver business outcomes by maximizing the power of data no matter where it resides – from the data center to the cloud and out to the edge – and move them forward in today’s digital, data-driven business landscape.

Organizations recognize that data is the critical element to growth and innovation. HCP is an object storage platform that intelligently manages data as a key business asset and govern it with integrated security to reduce compliance risks. This updates expand the capabilities of the HCP portfolio to help customers improve business productivity by making information available to users with strengthened security and data governance, while also helping to reduce costs across private and multi-cloud environments.

“Hitachi Vantara’s continued investment and innovations have placed the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio in a leadership position in the object-based storage market,” said Amita Potnis, research manager, file and object-based storage systems, IDC. “A recent study shows 56% of respondents plan to use private or multi-cloud platforms within the next 18 months. The latest software updates give customers the ability to own and control how their data is stored, protected, governed and accessed across workloads, on-premises storage platforms and multiple public cloud deployments.“

Extend data governance to reduce risk in multicloud environments
HCP is an object storage platform based on robust compliance features, metadata-driven classification, indexing and full content search designed to lower compliance costs associated with ever-changing regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

It makes sensitive data tamper-resistant with the latest governance capabilities including:

• Compliance enforcement in the public cloud: Amazon S3 extensions allow the use of HCP compliance capabilities, like retention and privileged delete, for application data ingested via the Amazon S3 application programming interface (API).

• Retention enhancements: Improved event-based retention to align with stringent requirements such as DoD 5015.02-STD – Electronic Records Management and SEC17a.

• Replication before tiering: Enhanced tiering-automation capabilities provide a global data protection level across multiple sites and improve data durability, optimize capacity and reduce costs.

• Protection against cybersecurity risks: HCP regularly undergoes third-party security audits and incorporates continuous, incremental updates to stay ahead of the latest threats. Because of this, it has won the Fortress Cyber Security and Stratus Cloud Computing awards.

Optimized for cloud: Drive down costs while increasing profitability
HCP delivers cost-optimized cloud object storage, performance and scale so that organizations can consolidate multiple application workloads onto a single platform. This enables customers to centralize their data first, inventory it and determine the best location to store the data based on cost, sensitivity or value – on premises, in the cloud or both. It can achieve over 60% lower storage costs over five years than using public cloud alone.

The latest innovations include:

• Cloud-native compatibility: HCP adds stronger compatibility with Amazon S3 API. This allows HCP to support new application requirements and an expanding ISV application ecosystem. Organizations can use it with big data applications to deliver cost savings by offloading content from tier-one storage.

• Flexible deployment options: In addition to software-only and appliance models, new support for VMware vSAN allows HCP to be run in hyperconverged environments such as the company’s Unified Compute Platform (UCP) to ensure availability, peformance and reliability.

• Enhanced performance monitoring: With Hitachi Content Monitor, organizations can aggregate and visualize system metrics from multiple HCP clusters into customizable dashboards. This is essential to organizations when managing and governing data at scale and using the delivered insights to maintain optimal performance.

Modernizing file services at edge to improve productivity
Updates to Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere (HCP Anywhere) extend the boundaries of the digital workplace to deliver sync-based file services at the edge. HCP Anywhere allows organizations to replace traditional file servers with cloud file storage or cloud home directories. It extends file-sharing data services from core data centers to remote and branch offices and end-user devices. This improves both collaboration and productivity, and enhances data protection against device failure, user error and attacks such as ransomware.

The release of HCP Anywhere includes the following enhancements:

• Cloud file services: HCP Anywhere Edge file services bring the sync technology of HCP Anywhere for user devices to ROBOs. HCP Anywhere Edge is a cloud storage gateway option that helps right-size and consolidate file servers at the edge by keeping only active data in local storage while allowing easy access to large amounts of data from the private or hybrid HCP cloud in customers’ data centers.

• Native Windows compatibility: HCP Anywhere Edge file services natively support Windows SMB 2 and 3 to reduce management overhead and eliminate the complexity of integrating, updating, testing and supporting the latest Windows updates.

• File data protection: HCP Anywhere Edge provides advanced data protection and recovery from user error, device failures and cyberattacks like ransomware, while eliminating the need for traditional backups. It also simplifies and centralizes data protection and management for multiple-user and edge devices from a single point of management.

“Hundreds of thousands of people across the state of Utah and beyond rely on University of Utah Health for a broad range of health care services. Faced with an increasing number of systems producing an ever-growing pool of data, the IT department needed an agile solution to ensure its data centers could support the organization now and in the future,” said Jim Livingston, CTO, University of Utah Health. “The new HCP-enabled software-defined environment means we can support growing data volumes without having to invest in additional hardware. We’ve seen a tenfold decrease in storage costs, despite storage growth across the organization. We now have the data center efficiency and agility we need to support innovation and future changes within the health care sector.“

“At Flexential, we are a proud Hitachi Vantara Cloud Service Provider Partner and rely on HCP as the foundation for delivering secure and cost-effective content services for unmatched reliability in delivering backup, archive and data governance to our customers,” said Mike Fuhrman, chief product officer, Flexential. “By bringing together object storage, file sync and share and sophisticated search, our use of HCP creates a tightly integrated, smart cloud storage solution with unique data protection capabilities powered by our people and expertise.“

“The latest innovations to the HCP portfolio allow customers to better govern and protect their data in a multicloud environment while helping to accelerate productivity from the data center to the edge,” said Linda Xu, VP, emerging solutions and cloud services marketing, Hitachi Vantara. “As organizations’ cloud, governance and data accessibility requirements continue to evolve rapidly, HCP provides a highly adaptive, massively scalable and cost-efficient cloud storage platform that helps businesses organize their data, extract intelligence and safely share it with a globally dispersed workforce, all through a single point of visibility and control.“

Updates to HCP portfolio are available.

Additional resources:
Blog post: Leveraging Cloud Services with HCP S3 Tiering, by Hu Yoshida
Blog post: Data Tiering from HCP to the Alibaba Cloud by Jeff Lundberg
Blog post: University of Utah Health Partners with Hitachi Vantara to Drive Innovation Through a Hybrid Cloud Environment by Govanna Flores