Hitachi Data Systems unveiled its plans for helping customers transform their data and announced cloud services to provide a fully managed, pay-per-use, private cloud environment on a customer’s premises. HDS has aligned its product and solutions portfolio around a three-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.
The company is introducing Cloud Services, 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. The 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 the services and solution packages, providing customers with an interface to access bill, payment and chargeback information.
It is estimated that by 2020 there will be a 42 times 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 all data has value and to fully realize this potential requires data and information to be stored, governed and managed as an asset.
“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 Woo, program vice president of storage and big data at IT research firm 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.”
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. The ParaScale technology serves as a key 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. Systems will enable information cloud by leveraging the ParaScale technology in addition to the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), network-attached storage (NAS) from BlueArc and other platforms.
“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 of HDS. “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.”