Hitachi Data Systems Unveils Cloud Enhancements to Help Organizations Increase the Value of Unstructured Data

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), today announced significant new enhancements to its award-winning object store, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and its bottomless, backup-free cloud on-ramp, Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI). These new enhancements reduce overall costs by enabling organizations to better manage unstructured data growth, ensure content security in shared storage environments and reduce the complexity and inefficiency in traditional, cloud computing and distributed IT environments.

“Organizations are looking for new, innovative approaches to deal with the expansive growth of unstructured content and extract the full value of their data,” said Miklos Sandorfi, chief strategist, Hitachi Data Systems. “Our content cloud approach allows organizations to store billions of data objects and use intelligence layers to index and search the data independently of the application that created it. The data is available across devices, anytime and anywhere. By deploying HCP and HDI, customers will cut costs in managing, storing and accessing data and build a foundation for the information cloud.”

About the new Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Data Ingestor

HCP and HDI provide high availability from the edge to the core and use advanced replication, automatic failover, erasure coding, nondisruptive hardware and software upgrades, and provide proactive monitoring and reporting of any system health or performance issues. This combination of capabilities lets administrators respond to issues before they threaten service level agreements (SLA). New HCP support for spin-down disk in Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) minimizes power and cooling costs for a total cost of ownership comparable to tape-based solutions. With thousands of tenants now able to share a single HCP and use it in many different ways, there are no infrastructure silos. With content consolidated in one HCP system, a new HCP metadata query tool searches system and custom metadata to look for trends and relationships.

Content can be distributed to HDI and “pinned” to the remote location, ensuring local access performance to a consistent set of data and reducing bandwidth consumption and costs. In addition, HDI offers high availability configurations to ensure continuous operation for service provider customers or remote and branch offices in distributed, private IT environments. Together, HCP and HDI help organizations and cloud service providers lower costs and complexities associated with storing large and rapidly growing volumes of unstructured data, while enabling fluid content with fast access and data life cycle management. New features and customer benefits include:

Improved Operational Efficiency to Lower Costs

• HCP leverages spin-down disk support in HUS to lower costs for large scale unstructured data storage and to reduce energy consumption
• HCP works with almost any application with support for HTTP/REST, CIFS, NFS, Symantec Enterprise Vault Streamer and more
• HDI VMware appliance support for high availability provides a lower cost alternative to meet high availability requirements with less infrastructure and complexity
• New content audit services discover and classify content and provide recommendations for improved efficiency and lower cost

Greater Scalability and Reliability

• Supports thousands of tenants and tens of thousands of namespaces per system, reducing costs per tenant and maximizing utilization
• Advanced replication and failover capabilities ensure service availability
• HCP improved component and performance monitoring and email alerting help proactively address any bottlenecks or hardware issues before they impact SLAs
• Support for tape-based copies of objects help meet vaulting requirements

Robust Security and Control from Edge and Core

• New object access control lists reduce the risk of unmanaged use of content
• Active directory integration helps support corporate security policies
• Custom metadata search identifies sets of related objects based on system and custom metadata
• Content distribution and file pinning ensures fast, local access to a consistent set of data

Supporting Quotes

• Acens: “By leveraging the secure multi-tenancy and compliance capabilities of HCP, with file serving on-ramp HDI, Acens is now a leading cloud services provider in Spain. Our cloud services have clear differentiation from our competitors’ simple and cheap online storage by providing feature-rich cloud storage to satisfy the needs of customers that require higher levels of service, availability, reliability and privacy and legislative compliance.” – Manuel Gómez, high level product manager
• CSC: “Customer files are being created in disparate locations all over the enterprise, and this information must be made meaningful and be protected. CSC’s Bottomless File Storage, powered by HCP and HDI, provides companies with a cost effective way to ingest these files into the data center, where data can be maintained according to its value, distributed to the resources that can make decisions based on it, secured against unauthorized use and grow with no limits in a sustainable fashion. With the help of HDI and HCP, our customers can reduce IT costs and complexity by eliminating backups and dependence on local storage and enjoy a truly backup-free and bottomless cloud environment.” – James Burke, executive, Platform and Storage Services
• Rocket Arkivio: “We are excited about our important role in the new object storage solution release from Hitachi Data Systems. Our Rocket Arkivio software helps customers optimize key benefits of HCP, including greater scalability and expanded operational efficiencies that help HDS customers around the world improve their efficiency and reduce storage costs.” – Giovanni Paliska, managing director

About Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Data Ingestor

Hitachi Content Platform is a virtualized object storage solution that enables simplified, intelligent and automated data management. It uses a new method that stores data as self-described objects, which allows advanced storage management and policies to be associated and managed at a very granular level, but with less overhead. With massive scale, multiple storage tiers, broad interoperability, secure multitenancy and configurable attributes for each tenant, customers can support a wide range of applications on a single cluster without creating silos. Working in conjunction with HDI, a bottomless, backup-free cloud on-ramp and file serving solution that sends data from the edge to the core infrastructure, HCP is the most scalable, reliable, efficient and easiest to use object store available in the market today.

The Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Data Ingestor enhancements are a new milestone in the Hitachi Data Systems 3-tiered strategy of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud. The strategy builds on existing IT investments to provide a single virtualization platform for all data. When content is untethered from the applications that created it, data is easier to find, share and repurpose, and is consequently more valuable. Working together, HCP and HDI provide application independence and intelligent lifecycle management capabilities that are key to achieving a content cloud that gives businesses control of their unstructured data with seamless access, search, retention, consolidation and archiving capabilities.

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About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer ROI, unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. With a vision that IT must be virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. With more than 5,400 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Hitachi Data Systems products, services and solutions are trusted by the world’s leading enterprises, including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 and more than 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100. Hitachi Data Systems believes that data drives our world – and information is the new currency. To learn more, visit: http://www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2010 (ended March 31, 2011) consolidated revenues totaled 9,315 billion yen ($112.2 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2012. All Rights Reserved. Hitachi is a registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Hitachi Data Systems is a registered trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. in the United States and other countries.