Cloud Portfolio Updates with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI)

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has introduced an updated version of Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and a new product called Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI). Last week, I had a chance to have a briefing on these two new offerings. These hit the wire today, here is HDS’s press release for the news.

Here are the key factors of of HCP 4 and HDI:

• This is targeted to the large enterprise for private cloud scenarios
• This is targeted to the cloud provider/co-location provider that doesn’t write their own APIs
• This integrates with existing HDS storage products, including the newly announced Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).
• Up to 40PB of usable capacity in a single physical cluster (VSP supports up to 255 PB, however)
• Technical features (Copied from pre-release materials):
• Multitenant
• Intelligent objects
• Chargeback
• Compression and deduplication
• Encryption of data at rest
• Authentication
• WORM
• Compliance and retention
• Built-in protection, preservation and replication
• High Availability architecture
• Continuous data integrity checking
• Advanced replication and disaster recovery

This figure captures HCP in a quick picture well:

While HCP is one technology in the ever-changing cloud technology environment, what really caught my eye was the new HDI component. Basically, HDI is  a cluster (initially/oddly of two Dell Servers) that provide CIFS and NFS endpoints to an HCP engine. This is entirely multi-tenant aware as well. The figure below shows a few features and how HDI fits into the HCP environment:

The small cluster component of general purpose servers for HDI also functions as a cache. There is 4TB of disk space in the HDI component to provide increased performance on the front-end of HCP. There are other features within HDI such as replicate on write and a network of stub-pointers to HCP.

I’m working to get a screen shot of the CIFS/NFS engines for HDI – as I believe that if that is an intuitive and seamless interface, the potential could be huge. More info is at the HCP homepage.