The new enhancements to the Hitachi Content Platform extends its value as an integrated content mobility solution.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) has announced an extension of the capabilities of all three elements of its Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio. The hybrid storage architecture has been enhanced with the new Hitachi Content Platform S10, which adds a new low cost, plug-and-play on-prem tier. For the first time, the architecture supports OpenStack as well. The two other components, Hitachi Data Ingestor and HCP Anywhere, have also been upgraded. The Ingestor improvements include elimination of the need for VPNs, while the Anywhere enhancements now provide mobile access to data stored in traditional NAS environments.

“We have three really tightly integrated platforms with our content platform, with Anywhere, our file sync and share tool, and with HDI, our Data Ingestor,” said Tanya Loughlin, director of content and cloud product marketing for HDS. “In June 2014, all three had major refreshes to enhance the three main use cases – data, workforce and cloud mobility – by enabling adaptive cloud tiering to set to any S3 enabled cloud. That allowed automation and setting policies to move data. Today we are extending it further, and taking that mobility story to the next level with a refresh of all three products.”

“The Hitachi Content Platform has always been object storage, and has been good for compliance,” said Jeff Lundberg, Senior Product Marketing Manager at HDS. “It always provided archive capabilities like metadata queries, but was capable of being a lot more than that, and now the focus has shifted from the archive feature set to other things, like being able to serve data up over web protocols.”

The new Hitachi Content Platform S10 introduces a new low cost plug-and-play local storage tier which can be added to an HCP environment.

“Now there is a low cost choice to keep data on-prem,” Loughlin said. “We have a lot of companies using HCP for big data environments, who want to keep it local and find certain data. There are also a lot of government organizations who don’t want data to go off site. The new tier is also ideal for very large environments.”

Also new is the integration into OpenStack, through the addition of support for the OpenStack Swift API, the OpenStack object storage project.

“Many customers want some capabilities in OpenStack for the enterprise that OpenStack doesn’t have today, so it’s not yet prime time on its own,” Lundberg said. “However, integrating it into HCP, which has been around in one form or another since 2008, allows for the open source environment with our robustness behind, because HCP has capabilities that OpenStack today does not.”

“There is a lot of interest in OpenStack now for certain,” said Tim Desai, also a Senior Product Marketing Manager at HDS. “A few years ago, interest would have been small, but customers have been inquiring about when we would be supporting it, one large bank in particular.”

Hitachi Data Ingestor is a file and cloud gateway which simplifies management for file services in remote or branch offices or at storage service providers’ customer sites, acting as a local cache which connects to any HCP cloud and removing the need for local backups.

“We have made some modifications in this release, which removes the need for VPNs, which means less cost and complexity,” Loughlin said. “We have also extended management capability with simplified provisioning to single node and VMs”

The improvements to Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere empowers mobile workers, going beyond file sync and share to help IT bridge the gap between traditional NAS and next-generation file services.

“It now enables mobile access to data stored in traditional NAS environments,” Loughlin said. Device support has also been expanded with the addition of Windows Phone. The number of languages supported is up to seven. AFS and Sendmail now join Active Directory as supported authentication services.