The new content intelligence solution joins the Hitachi Content Platform, an integrated cloud-file gateway and an enterprise file sync and sharing platform as core elements of a broad object storage portfolio.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has announced Hitachi Content Intelligence, a new platform within its Hitachi Content Portfolio for object storage. It complements the existing analytics capability HDS added with its acquisition last year of Pentaho by adding the ability to find data in a Data Lake.

“Think of object storage as your Data Lake,” said ‎Paul Lewis, CTO at Hitachi Data Systems Canada. “The problem is that Data Lakes tend to remain dark and inaccessible. This tool allows for that accessibility. Everyone who uses the Hitachi Content Portfolio will require it, because it provides the ability to discover data within the lake.” This ability to aggregate multi-structured data allows insights to be surfaced faster, and data management and governance to be more complete. It also allows the user to understand the distribution of organizational data based on its value to the business.

“The analytics capability that Hitachi Content had previously was significant, but it was used more in a data refinement capability,” Lewis said. “This is more about the discovery of content in object storage. It is software that allows you to find nuggets of gold in the pot.”

Hitachi Content Intelligence provides a standard and consistent enterprise search process across the entire IT environment, across heterogeneous data silos and different locations. It supports distributed and dynamic cluster sizes that can burst to more than 10,000 instances. It deploys with an intuitive workflow designer, administration tools, and a guided data exploration and search application.

Lewis also emphasized that the Hitachi Content Portfolio turns this data into relevant business information that is delivered to business users in a format that they can understand and consume.

“This is all about organizing your data for business context,” he said. “This is designed for a business user accessing this data, not an IT person. It has self service capabilities. It allows you to find data from the Data Lake, combine it with other data from that same source, and visualize it according to a business perspective in a way that a business user can make use of it. They can apply their own business context through the ability to search through depths of unstructured data.” The offering also provides support for detailed queries and ad hoc natural language searches.

The new intelligence solution rounds out the HCP portfolio, which in addition to the Hitachi Content Platform, includes the Hitachi Cloud Ingestor integrated cloud-file gateway and the Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere enterprise file sync and sharing platform. It is the only object storage portfolio on the market today with all of these capabilities.

“It’s important to understand that we aren’t a storage company – we are a data company,” Lewis said “We see the fulfilment of data use being the central core of our business, as opposed to selling storage infrastructure. Hitachi Content Intelligence complements this. It complements our ability to treat data as the IT asset.”