Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd, announced major updates to the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio, providing a path to digital transformation for enterprises while achieving significant cost savings over public cloud. The integrated portfolio offers the capability to increase profitability and productivity through cloud economics and by applying analytics to uncover new opportunities and insights. It also can reduce risk by enhancing security, availability and data protection.

With this release, HCP gains a 400 percent increase in usable storage per cluster, 67 percent more storage node capacity via 10TB drives, a 55 percent increase in objects per node and simplified software licensing so customers can achieve over 5x lower storage costs than public cloud, which leads to over 60% TCO savings than public cloud for enterprise use cases.

“Once again, we’ve raised the bar for object storage with our uniquely integrated Hitachi Content Platform portfolio. Hitachi Content Platform provides the ideal ecosystem to support customers’ existing content-centric applications and newer cloud use cases and workloads simultaneously. It also provides a central way for customers to securely incorporate hybrid cloud storage on their terms to react faster to change and to optimize costs.” — Peter Sjoberg, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud and Mobility, Hitachi Data Systems

The HCP portfolio is a unique end-to-end solution that eliminates silos; promotes collaboration; enables governance and compliance; provides safeguards for sensitive data; automates management in private, hybrid and multicloud environments; and surfaces insights through sophisticated search and analytics. The HCP portfolio includes Hitachi Content Platform for software-defined object storage; HCP Anywhere for file synchronization and sharing and data protection capabilities; Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI), an elastic-scale cloud file gateway; and Hitachi Content Intelligence, where rapid insights emerge from your data.

“At MCIS, Inc., we are a healthcare information technology company dedicated to delivering and managing innovative products and services. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Marshfield Clinic Health System (MCHS), MCIS products and services deliver better outcomes at lower costs across the system. Hitachi helped us decrease costs with the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio’s native, self-healing capabilities, which 2 removed the need for traditional backups. We’ve expanded with Hitachi to include other medical imaging sources and as a replacement of traditional backups for large static datasets within MCHS. The flexible security, multi-tenant support, and built-in encryption, combined with other products from the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio, have also allowed us to realize true cost savings by enabling us to repurpose existing primary storage capacity, deferring budgeted upgrades and delaying new purchases.” — Tim Buss, Vice President, Infrastructure Services and Chief Technology Officer, Marshfield Clinic Information Services (MCIS)

“Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen is committed to leveraging innovative IT solutions to provide the best healthcare to our patients. Over the past four years, Hitachi Content Platform has consistently delivered value as a highly scalable cloud-based clinical repository that can integrate with any clinical system. Furthermore, the healthcare data stored on HCP is readily available, which has drastically improved the speed and quality of our response to patient emergencies. We are excited about the addition of Hitachi Content Intelligence to the HCP product portfolio based on the potential to use sophisticated analytics to accelerate diagnoses.” — Elmar Flamme, CIO, Klinikum WelsGrieskirchen

“The challenges surrounding unstructured data growth has triggered a renaissance in object storage; both on-premises and in the cloud. The key to next-generation data management lies in collecting the high quality metadata needed to provide enhanced data visibility, automation and policy-based management regardless of where the data may physically reside. The economics of storage are evolving, and the smart move may be to start with an on-prem object storage framework that best matches company needs and is extensible to public cloud options; rather than the other way around.” — Steven Hill, Senior Storage Analyst, 451 Research

Hitachi Content Platform Updates

As traditional organizations transform to compete with companies born in the digital era, they need a cloud-driven infrastructure for greater agility. With this release, HCP gains a 400 percent increase in usable storage per cluster, 67 percent more storage node capacity via 10TB drives, a 55 percent increase in objects per node and simplified software licensing so customers can achieve over 5x lower storage costs than public cloud alone. Customers can also take advantage of enhanced multipart file transfers to speed performance of large file uploads, downloads and range reads for Amazon cloud storage applications. APIs have also been enhanced to give organizations greater visibility to analyze the performance and health of their infrastructure.

For today’s always-on IT environments, HCP offers several reliability, availability, security and flexibility improvements. HCP adds geo-distributed erasure coding for multisite deployments, resulting in lower capacity overheads, reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), and faster rebuilds. Corrupted files are restored from storage across geographies, rather than from redundant sites, which maintains availability during adverse events, such as a large-scale outage. HCP users may choose the right combination of data protection options including local and geographically distributed erasure coding, RAID and replication based on their business, regulatory and performance requirements. This release also includes a variety of customer-driven enhancements to further extend existing serviceability and monitoring capabilities. To provide customers with even greater flexibility, HCP has added KVM Hypervisor support to further improve the total cost of ownership and extend software-defined capabilities.

To address security-conscious customer needs, HCP has added a dedicated management port that isolates user and administrator network traffic for an added level of security.

Hitachi Data Ingestor Updates

With Hitachi Data Ingestor, organizations can greatly reduce risk, cost and complexity of providing IT services to geographically dispersed locations and cloud users. New features include multipart file transfers to HCP for faster uploads of large files such as videos. Other enhancements include: easier resolution of content sharing conflicts, universal file migration improvements that boost performance, and updated cryptographic hash algorithms to further protect data.

Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere Updates

This announcement builds on HCP Anywhere updates announced last month to enable organizations to advance their digital workplace experience in a way that incorporates existing content repositories; delivers next-generation file sharing, collaboration and data protection capabilities; simplify searches; and provides APIs to design new workflows and customize the user experience. For additional details, the full release is available here.

Hitachi Content Intelligence

Announced in November 2016, this search and analytics solution is the latest addition to the portfolio which allows organizations to exploit the value of their data. The Hitachi Content Platform portfolio is the only offering that allows organizations to bring together object storage, file sync and share, cloud storage gateways, and sophisticated search and analytics to create a tightly integrated, simple and smart cloud storage solution. For additional details the full release is available here.

Enrico Signoretti, Head of Product Strategy at OpenIO, in a March 2017 Gigaom report called Sector Roadmap: Object storage for enterprise capacity-driven workloads, wrote the following: “The HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) is one of the most successful enterprise object storage platforms in the market. It has more than 1700 customers, with an average cluster capacity between 200 and 300TB. … Alongside the hardware ecosystem, HDI (remote NAS gateway) and HCP Anywhere (Sync & Share) stand out for the quality of their integration and feature set.”

Hitachi Data Systems is a sponsor at the Cloud Expo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City.