HDS Unfurls Data Management Service

Designed to be a virtual extension of an HDS customer’s on-premise storage environment, Hitachi Cloud Services wrap customer data in a metadata repository managed by HDS. That metadata repository allows customers to treat HDS storage in the cloud as a virtual storage resource through which they can dynamically access data, said Tanya Loughlin, manager of cloud product marketing at HDS.

As the amount of unstructured data that needs to be managed continues to grow, HDS is moving to address the storage infrastructure issues that customers will experience as the number of storage systems they need to manage all that data continues to expand. Loughlin said the HDS service is not designed to replace on-premise storage as much as it is to augment on-premise storage by freeing up space on those systems for the most frequently accessed files.

Hitachi Cloud Services come in three flavors: a Hitachi Cloud Service for Private File Tiering; a Hitachi Cloud Service for File Serving; and a Hitachi Cloud Service for Microsoft SharePoint Archiving.

According to Loughlin, the Hitachi Cloud Services leverage technology that HDS gained with the recent acquisitions of ParaScale, which developed data analytics tools, and BlueArc, which developed file virtualization technology that allows customers to index, search and discover multiple data types independent of the applications that were originally used to create the data.

That capability is critical, said Loughlin, in an era of application rationalization that is seeing IT organizations eliminate redundant applications but still have a need to access the data that was originally used to create that data. The BlueArc file virtualization technology, she said, provides the capabilities to not only tier that data in the cloud, but also automate the movement of that data between the customer’s premise and the Hitachi Cloud Service.