Enhancements to Hitachi Data Ingestor Help Organizations Reduce Costs and Simplify Cloud Adoption

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT / TSE:6501), today introduced enhancements to Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI), a bottomless, backup-free cloud on-ramp and filer, to help organizations simplify and accelerate cloud adoption. Featuring new content sharing, file restore and NAS migration capabilities, the new version of HDI gives seamlessly scalable, backup-free storage solutions to distributed consumers of IT, such as remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) or cloud storage users. Working in conjunction with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), a virtualized object store with advanced storage and data management capabilities, HDI is deployed as a minimal-footprint or virtual appliance that sends data from the edge to the core infrastructure to easily and cost-effectively help customers move data to the cloud at their own pace.

Organizations look for ways to reduce the costs, complexities and risks associated with today’s aggressive growth of unstructured data, particularly when providing IT services to geographically disperse locations or cloud consumers. Together, HDI and HCP are an integrated edge-to-core solution with seamless, bottomless scalability and backup-free storage. The combination greatly reduces the cost and complexity of providing IT services to distributed environments such as remote or branch offices, organizations building an internal private cloud, or service providers creating a standard on-ramp for cloud adoption.

"For many organizations, the ability to store and protect company data at one location can be a daunting task. With multiple sites, the ability to securely and adequately manage that data becomes exponentially more difficult. To help organizations with this challenge, Hitachi Data Systems has taken the general concept of object storage a leap forward with the new enhancements to HDI,” said Miki Sandorfi, chief strategist, File, Content and Cloud, Hitachi Data Systems. "Combined with HCP, the new HDI solution will allow customers to properly manage, protect and backup the data residing at the edge, and reduce their infrastructure footprint.”

Hitachi Data Ingestor: New Content Sharing, File Restore, and NAS Migration

Acting as a caching device, HDI provides users and applications with seemingly endless storage and newly available capabilities for cloud and distributed IT environments, including:

• Content sharing – enabling "edge-dispersion” of data across a network of HDI systems
  • Multiple HDI systems can read from a single HCP namespace, giving an HDI system access to other HDI systems
  • Users can deploy a wide area content distribution framework
• File restore
  • Users can retrieve previous versions of a file as well as deleted files
  • Users maintain file and directory access control
• NAS migration
  • Users can transparently migrate data from NAS and Windows Servers to HDI
  • Automated throttling and continuous migration of data into HDI are supported

Benefits to Customers

The new version of HDI provides customers with enhanced manageability and flexibility specifically designed for cloud and distributed IT environments, to help organizations reduce cost and IT complexity, and drive practical strategies to simplify and accelerate cloud deployments. Benefits include:

• Reduces costs
  • Helps eliminate backups at the edge by providing a highly available on-ramp into a centralized storage solution and taking advantage of robust storage management capabilities
  • Improves efficiency and utilization by consolidating distributed silos
• Simplifies IT
  • Reduces islands of storage and infrastructure
  • Increases efficiencies through bottomless storage at the edge with intelligent management capabilities.
• Reduces risk
  • Supports compliance and retention capabilities
  • Supports full integration with Active Directory and LDAP
• Streamlines cloud deployments and adoption
  • Supports multitenant, multi-namespace environments

About HDI and HCP

HDI is an intelligent on-ramp for users and applications at the edge. Representing the remote site in ROBO and cloud environments, HDI connects to HCP at a core data center. Together, HDI and HCP work as a single solution to orchestrate the agility and robust characteristics necessary for rapid cloud adoption and cost-efficient, distributed IT deployments. Complex data and storage management practices are cost-effectively centralized and automated, and tape-based backup is eliminated. In addition, cloud service providers can deliver the benefits of cloud storage without having to build and maintain their own edge-to-core infrastructure.

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About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer ROI, unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. With a vision that IT must be virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. With more than 5,300 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Hitachi Data Systems products, services and solutions are trusted by the world’s leading enterprises, including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 and more than 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100. Hitachi Data Systems believes that data drives our world – and information is the new currency. To learn more, visit: http://www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2010 (ended March 31, 2011) consolidated revenues totaled 9,315 billion yen ($112.2 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2011. All Rights Reserved. Hitachi is a registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Hitachi Data Systems is a registered trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. in the United States and other countries.