Pay-Per-Use Cloud Storage Frees Space, Reduces Enterprise/SMB TCO

The Hitachi Cloud Service for Private File Tiering managed service, unveiled by Hitachi Data Systems Corporation earlier today, is the first in what is planned to be a larger Hitachi Cloud Services suite moving forward.

Using the new offering, Hitachi says enterprise customers will be able to move legacy or lower-value file data into a cloud storage environment and pay only for the space they consume.

Such unstructured data as business documents, file data, PACS records, video surveillance and Web content that resides in file shares or home directories often are stored in multiple independent file servers or NAS appliances Hitachi said are “costly to manage and take precious time and resources away from the most active and frequently accessed data. A large portion of the data sitting on expensive primary NAS devices consumes significant capacity that requires constant backup, which in turn takes up even more capacity in the storage network.”

As such, Hitachi Data Systems’ Private File Tiering service “will deliver a fully managed Hitachi Cloud Services suite and cloud-enabled infrastructure that can be located within a customer’s environment.”?

Partnering with Digi-Data Corporation, Hitachi also is offering a public online cloud storage solution (perhaps in competition with Google) that provides what they say is “a complete services menu for telecommunications, service providers and systems integrators to deliver public cloud storage-as-a-service offerings to consumers and small to medium-sized businesses. Both (cloud) offerings help organizations meet service level agreements, lower total cost of ownership and improve operational efficiency.”

Hitachi Data Systems and Digi-Data also are providing a set of services to help reduce time to market. Such services as Web portal integration help simplify customer on-boarding, and single sign-on and e-commerce integration help extend the capabilities of providers’ IT teams.

“The Hitachi Data Systems integrated portfolio of cloud technologies, solutions and services simplifies and accelerates the adoption of private, hybrid and public cloud environments. Our uniquely integrated approach enables organizations to adopt a cloud computing model at their own pace and in a cost-effective manner that builds on the investments IT organizations have in place today,” said Miki Sandorfi, chief strategist/File and Content at Hitachi Data Systems. “With the new Hitachi Cloud Service for Private File Tiering, our customers don’t pay up front for storage used and can use additional storage when needed. Best of all, they don’t need any resources to manage their private cloud environment. This is tremendously valuable, as it gives our customers the agility to grow and shrink capacity to meet the ever-changing demands of their business.”

Sandorfi told Communications Technology that his company’s new suite of cloud offerings is a way of integrating the IT department into the cloud while being “a huge effort to reduce IT worries about the data center.” He also told us the TCO of a NAS environment could be cut by anywhere between 25 percent and 35 percent by using the cloud-based storage service.

“We take the fear out by delivering services directly within their data centers on a pay-per-use basis,” he continued. “There is no initial capital expenditure. Customers are only charged by the terabytes of space they consume.”? 

The Hitachi Cloud Service for Private File Tiering managed service moves legacy or lower-value file data to a private cloud located within the customer’s firewall, and business customers pay only for the storage that they consume when they consume it and eliminating the need for any customer resources to manage the environment. According to Hitachi Data, the business service includes:

• The Hitachi Content Platform (HCP): A single optimized storage platform that abstracts details of the back end storage systems and creates homogeneous storage environments, HCP enables customers to create an agile, unstructured content environment with general purpose object stores that support a variety of services. HCP enables organizations to gain the benefits of consolidation and data preservation without compromising security or completely rewriting critical applications.
• ??A flexible, modular design that allows customers to scale the platform on demand to as much as 40 petabytes of usable storage in a single cluster.
• Secure segregation of data within different namespaces to prevent unauthorized access. Built-in high availability and RAID 6 data protection also allow customers to provide online access, protect against data loss and reduce tape-based backups of unstructured data.
• Varied media options, including high density SATA to provide maximum capacity at a lower price point, to help customers reduce their overall TCO.
• ??Hitachi Remote Storage Management services: Remote management and dynamic provisioning of the cloud storage environment provides capacity information and performance reporting. The company said its remote storage management services “quickly and cost effectively provide best practice monitoring, provisioning, reporting and consumption-based billing capabilities for the file tiering cloud environment.”??
• Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) software: Powered by CommVault and integrated with the Hitachi Content Platform, HDPS provides intelligent policy-based data movement that enables seamless tiering to the cloud.

Sandorfi also told CT in an interview prior to this new product introduction that “we have had hugely positive feedback from the test IT departments. The technology we’re leveraging is well-proved, prebaked and managed. There are no surprises.” 

-Debra Baker