Hitachi Data Systems launches latest version for content platform portfolio
The platform now includes a low-cost tier that utilises consumer grade drives to lower the cost barriers to adoption.
The vendor said its portfolio is the only one on the market that offers integrated solutions for private and hybrid Cloud, OpenStack, elastic scale backup-free Cloud gateways, file sync and share, and mobile access to enterprise NAS file shares from a single architecture.
HDS chief technology officer Asia Pacific, Adrian De Luca, said the platform portfolio has evolved from being a stand alone appliance product.
"For the last couple of generations of the product we have offered it in different types of packaging. You can run it as an appliance, you can interconnect it to public Cloud or you can run it as a software only."
"The S10 is a new type of packaging where the tier of storage that it uses in this particular type of packaging is low-cost. Using consumer grade drives and erasure coding that basically lowers the cost of storing and archiving data.
"It's targeted to any requirement where there is a need to store lots of data. That could be an SMB or an enterprise. By using consumer grade drives, while still providing high levels of availability and recall while reducing the cost.
"Despite using consumer grade drives, you are not sacrificing enterprise availability. The reason is the method of storing data on those drives, erasure coding.
"The traditional way of storing data on these drives is using a RAID array. RAID falls down because we are now producing very large drives of four to six terabytes and up, when you have a failure, the rebuild time or the time it takes to recover lost data takes a lot longer, it can take days. That's an exposure that many organisations are not prepared to wear.
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"Erasure coding works a little differently in that we store multiple copies of data so that rebuild scenarios are reduced. If we reduce the scenarios upon which rebuilds can happen there is less exposure to the business if you lose additional drives. This is why erasure coding is used for archival purposes and is perfectly suited to our content platform where repositories or archives of infrequently accessed data are being used."
De Luca said the platform is a more effective and efficient way of protecting very large data silos.
"For partners that are delivering solutions such as backup free, we have seen a movement in the last couple of years toward avoiding things like backup. These are what the HCP were designed to do by archiving copies of data, you don't have to back them up.
"It's efficient from a process perspective but in the past these type of systems have been very expensive. By utilising consumer grade components, we are able to increase the potential market for our partners due to a lower barrier to entry.
"We are also opening up greater support for some of the open source technologies like OpenStack. We are seeing the SMB community as well as partners starting to build more capability around implementing open source solutions. The ability to plug in to that framework is necessary if you are looking for an open source solution," he said.
The HDS content platform S10 is available now through channel partners.
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