Hitachi Introduces 21st Century Digital Archiving Solution
Hitachi Data Systems, provider of Application Optimized Storage' solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), today entered the "active archive" market by unveiling its much anticipated 21st century digital archiving solution, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform. Where first generation content-addressed storage (CAS) solutions failed to deliver open standards based interfaces, seamless scalability and enterprise class levels of data protection, Hitachi is again changing the storage landscape with an active archive solution that addresses these long-standing issues.
"When a company needs to search back through 10 years of electronic data and retrieve information, an archive is no longer static, it's active," said Jack Domme, senior vice president, Global Solutions, Strategy and Development, Hitachi Data Systems. "First generation CAS solutions were not built with the requirements of records management in mind and tried to answer the demand by using an API between archive applications and the archive repository. These proprietary solutions focused on storing content, not on accessing it?they lacked scalability, ease of migration across generations of future technology, and were comprised of solutions made up of disparate silos of business information. This is costing companies money today and will be an increasing problem as these silos increase in number and require future technology refreshes. We are the only company with a solution that answers the demands of records managers and IT."
"There are three basic reasons to archive: archiving to improve operational metrics yields the highest ROI of any storage management project; archiving for compliance can keep your company officers out of jail; and archiving because the data is fundamental to generating revenue (e.g. medical records)," said Robert Passmore, vice president, Research, Gartner. "What all three have in common is an audit trail to insure information integrity, management policy to control retention and refresh, and the ability to search for and retrieve information when needed."
Just as Hitachi redefined storage virtualization with the introduction of the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, Hitachi is redefining the digital data archive. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is an active archive solution comprised of both software and hardware, which supports policy-based integration from many distributed or centralized repositories such as e-mail, file systems, databases, applications and content or document management systems. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform ensures secure archival-quality retention, preservation and verifiable destruction of content. Through the use of the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, users can leverage a set of common and unified archive services such as centralized search, policy-based retention, authentication and protection.
E-mail, patient medical images or account information are critical digital records that must be managed and retained for operational, business, legal, or regulatory mandates. Companies that have purchased first generation content addressed storage solutions have found that they could not adequately scale to meet the growth of these files, preserve the integrity of the data or easily locate and/or retrieve this information in response to corporate litigation and electronic discovery requirements.
"The Hitachi Content Archive Platform addresses the needs of storage and IT administrators for compliance and legal discovery," said John Webster, senior analyst and founder, Data Mobility Group. "The significant additional benefit is that it offers the CIO an ability to leverage the active archive for use in business intelligence (BI) types of applications as well."
"Our analysis of Hitachi's Content Archive Platform demonstrates that combining storage level services with archiving services has the potential to deliver attractive benefits to customers," said David Floyer, chief technical officer and co-founder, ITCentrix. "By providing a complete set of services and an ability to integrate multiple applications easily, our hospital case study for an initial 11 terabyte archiving system shows Hitachi?s approach delivers $92K in IT cost savings relative to a traditional best-of-breed solution and $2.3M in incremental business-side benefit."
Open, Standards-Based Integration
While first generation CAS solutions require a proprietary API to integrate content-producing applications with their systems, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform uses open, standards-based interfaces such as NFS, CIFS, WebDAV and HTTP as well as storage management standards such as SMI-S' saving companies money on additional development and training costs associated with proprietary APIs. In addition, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform stores files in their native form with original names to ensure easy access to and retrieval of data over time.
"The Hitachi Content Archive Platform represents a new and better way of addressing the archiving marketplace," said Dave Vellante, CEO, ITCentrix. "Previous attempts to provide solutions have either been vertically integrated, which means any developed solution creates storage lock-in, or software-based which limits performance and scalability. By separating logical services from physical storage, which allows both to scale independently, Hitachi has created a more open archiving platform that can better leverage and utilize (installed) storage assets and dramatically improve financial returns."
"Users must meet today's business requirements and also look to the future and their ability to refresh their digital archives when current storage platforms become obsolete over time," said Tom Trainer, senior analyst, Evaluator Group, Inc. "With Hitachi Content Archive Platform, Hitachi Data Systems now makes it easier for users to maintain standard file formats and this can make future technology upgrades and migrations simpler and more seamless when users leverage existing storage features and functionality found within the Hitachi Data Systems product line."
In support of the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, Hitachi has partnered with several leading application, file system, enterprise content management and database archiving companies to ensure interoperability for customers.
Full-Text Search across All Content
"Older archive approaches, either paper-based or electronic, acted as physically separate file cabinets," said Laura DuBois, research director, Storage Software, IDC. "The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is one of the few solutions that securely supports the archive of content from different applications, both commercial and home-grown systems, and structured and unstructured data into a single active archive architecture, while effectively eliminating redundant data across applications."
No-Limit Scalability, Reliability and Performance
To meet the growing demand for storing, preserving and searching digital records, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform scales to over 300 terabytes and supports 350 million files per archive, and can scale linearly with additional capacity allowing companies to stay ahead of their growing digital archive requirements. Using proven high-end Hitachi storage functionality such as RAID in a storage area network (SAN) + array of independent node (SAIN) architecture, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform ensures unrivaled data protection. With 4 gigabytes of cache per server, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform delivers up to 5 times better performance than first-generation CAS solutions.
"The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is one of the most impressive digital archiving storage systems in the market today in terms of scalability, reliability and ease of management," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Hitachi platform provides a true single cluster that enables companies to economically grow their digital archives as needed with near linear scalable performance. One of the most important aspects of the Hitachi solution is that no matter how large you grow your digital archive, whether it is 100 files or 100 million files, it's just as easy to manage. ESG feels that Hitachi is extremely well-positioned to be a digital archiving leader with its best-in-class solution and also because of their excellent reputation, strong customer loyalty, world-class service and support, and market position."
Reduced Archive Costs with Tiered Storage and Integrated Management
Building on Hitachi Data Systems' Application Optimized Storage strategy of aligning storage resources with application requirements, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform provides an archive tier of storage where aged data on primary storage can be moved. Working with Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform or Network Storage Controller intelligent virtual storage controllers, data in the active archive can be offloaded from expensive disk to less-expensive ATA, SATA storage improving overall application performance.
As opposed to burdening customers by introducing yet another island of storage for content archives and yet another set of software tools and management interfaces, Hitachi customers will be able to monitor, report on and control the entire Hitachi Data Systems tiered storage infrastructure, including the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, from a single management interface, reducing operating expenses.
Hitachi Content Archive Platform
The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is an integrated solution of proven software and storage systems:
Hitachi Content Archiver — The Hitachi Content Archiver, powered by Archivas®, is the software component which provides the intelligence, policy-based control, authentication, preservation and protection of the Hitachi Content Archive Platform. The software runs on a pre-configured operating system which runs on industry standard servers.
Hitachi Content Archive Platform Storage — The initial Hitachi Content Archive Platform configurations leverage the Hitachi TagmaStore Workgroup Modular Storage, model WMS100 SATA-based storage system. The Hitachi WMS100 offers high capacity, easy-to-install data storage ideal for active archive environments. The WMS100 matches requirements for the cost-effective scalability, easy upgrade and performance in a small footprint while maintaining renowned Hitachi reliability.
For additional information about Hitachi Data Systems' latest innovations in the active archive market, visit: http://www.hds.com/products_services/content_archive_platform
About Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems leverages global R&D resources to develop storage solutions built on industry-leading technology with the performance, availability and scalability to maximize customers' ROI and minimize their risk. By focusing on the customer's perspective as we apply the best hardware, software, and services from Hitachi and our partners, we uniquely satisfy our customers' business needs.
With approximately 2,900 employees, Hitachi Data Systems conducts business through direct and indirect channels in the public, government and private sectors in over 170 countries and regions. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.