Hitachi Looks for Unstructured Solution

Hitachi Data Systems unveiled a trio of new products today at Cebit in Germany.

The vendor launched two NAS products: the Hitachi Essential NAS platform aimed at the midmarket, and the Hitachi High Performance NAS Platform 3000 series aimed at large enterprises. The company also launched the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (DDS), which allows companies to search and retrieve unstructured data in NAS environments. All three products sit under the company’s Service Oriented Storage Solutions strategy.

According to Brenda Peffer, vice president of Global Marketing at Hitachi Data Systems, the need to control unstructured data, such as video and e-mail, will become a problem as compliance and legislation dictates that such files need to be easily archived and retrieved. “Companies can’t just ignore this anymore, they have to be able to find this type of data and manage it,” she told eWEEK.

She said with the DDS product, Hitachi is looking to provide storage services such as search, provisioning and replication across a storage pool, whether the data is structured or unstructured. Previously, the vendor could only offer such storage services across structured data. DDS will also search across the vendor’s new NAS systems.

The Essential NAS Platform, aimed at the midmarket, is for day-to-day file system management, Peffer said, and manages up to 512 TB of data in a 2-node cluster. It is available either as a NAS gateway or filer, although Peffer admitted that the platform will not retrieve data as quickly as its enterprise-level cousin, the High Performance 3000 Series.

The 3000 Series is part of a joint venture between Hitachi and BlueArc, in which Hitachi has already invested to own part of the company. “BlueArc’s technology sits underneath ours and helped us with the scalability and the fast performance,” Peffer said. The 3000 Series doubles the performance of Hitachi’s current high-end NAS platform and it’s tailored to file- and object-based data. The vendor claims it is the first NAS solution that can manage up to 4 petabytes of data in a single storage pool with each file system reaching up to 256TB.

Peffer said all three products will be available through the vendor’s network of channel partners.