Yesterday Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) used SNW USA to release information on their proposed cloud strategy, referred to as “Agile Cloud”. Everyone believes they need a cloud story and clearly Hitachi are no different.
Taken from the presentation I was given last week, is the following picture. This pretty much sums up Hitachi’s approach; make a virtue of the technology they have today around virtualisation and revamp their Content Archive Platform as a generic content platform — HCP.
Most of the things you’d expect are there — multi-tenancy, consistent name spaces, security, data tiering, REST interface to the HCP platform, but one or two differences stuck out for me. Firstly Hitachi are not about to get into the business of being a cloud services provider (CSP), like EMC, Microsoft, Amazon et al, but rather are making their technology available to other service providers to take up this challenge. Second, they are not betting on commodity solutions for data storage (e.g. Atmos) but are assuming Enterprise customers will want the same level of reliability they currently enjoy on existing Hitachi hardware.
With stories in The Press regarding data loss in cloud offerings ringing in everyone’s ears, there’s sure to be an increased focus on transparency regarding data security — not from an access point of view but on the use of technologies like RAID, backup and other methodologies cloud providers will implement to ensure data loss doesn’t occur. It’s also an opening for increasing the price and breadth of service offerings — a tiered approach to cloud storage provision as clearly one size/protection level doesn’t fit all.
