Customer and Partner Momentum Reaches New Heights amid Growing Demand for High-Performance, Highly Scalable Content Services
CeBIT 2008 – HANNOVER, GERMANY, March 4, 2008 — Building on its success and momentum in the active archive market, Hitachi today announced several industry-leading enhancements to its 21st century digital archiving solution, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform. The enhanced Hitachi Content Archive Platform is an integral component of the Hitachi Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy and features new authentication services to ensure the secure, long-term preservation and retrieval of valuable information. Amid growing customer demand for a first class active archive solution, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform has gained strong momentum in the market, deployed across hundreds of customer sites with Hitachi’s rapidly expanding ecosystem of independent software vendor (ISV) partners.
With simple integration via open, standards-based interfaces like CIFS, NFS, and HTTP, and an active archive storage layer that supports partner and customer data retention policies, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform has built a growing network of ISV partners which include some of the world’s leading technology vendors. When combined with the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, these solutions allow customers to meet their current e-mail, file, and ECM/ERM archiving requirements, and allowing scalability for the future. This rapidly growing partner ecosystem has fueled Hitachi Content Archive deployments across hundreds of the most demanding customer sites around the world, across a wide range of industries, including financial services, insurance, telecommunications and government.
"The unprecedented partner and customer demand that we have experienced for the Hitachi Content Archive Platform is a direct reflection of the surge in unstructured data and the increasing need for high performance, massively scalable storage solutions that are capable of finding the equivalent of a needle in a haystack in record time," said Michael Hay, senior director, Product Strategy, Hitachi Data Systems. "Despite the exponential growth in data across all industries, businesses today are expected to transform both structured and unstructured data spread across their enterprise into business intelligence and actionable information upon a single request. The new features and flexibility of the Hitachi Content Archive Platform deliver the speed, authentication, security and scalability organizations need to manage constant change and prepare for a future of unhindered data expansion."
"Growth in corporate content across industries and geographies averages 52 percent annually, resulting from new systems coming online, new content types, mergers and acquisitions, market expansion, globalization and transition from a paper to digital workplace and economy," said Laura DuBois, program director, Storage Software, IDC. "As managing information becomes crucial to business viability, risk mitigation and corporate compliance in today’s business environment, the technologies used to store, search, and recover data are increasingly important to every facet of business. As a result, we will continue to see demand for sophisticated content archiving technologies and file services to enable businesses to manage their data from beginning to end and transfer the cost benefits of disciplined structured data management principles to the bottom line."
The Hitachi Content Archive Platform delivers the specific content services
that customers are demanding to enable them to meet their data retention, scalability, preservation and protection requirements. It is the first solution that enables customers to scale archive server nodes and storage capacity independently capable of addressing up to 80 petabytes in an archive system. To achieve this degree of scaling, other archiving solutions require many independent foot prints, increasing their total cost of ownership. Only the Hitachi Content Archive Platform allows customers to leverage existing storage infrastructure, consolidating the number of footprints to achieve high scale, decrease heat emissions, power consumption and simplify management—resulting in greatly reduced TCO.
Enhanced Security and Search
Customers have new demands and need to meet new data retention, scalability, preservation and protection requirements as mandated by governmental regulations and corporate governance. Certain sensitive data can only be viewed by senior executives while much broader access is needed for other information. The enhanced Hitachi Content Archive Platform provides advanced administrative and linkages to common authentication services making it easier to administer management access to the system. All administrative functions are encrypted, and all administrative events are logged by unique login IDs. Multiple, configurable roles can be created and permissions assigned to each administrative login. In addition, system events can be broadcast and sent to a set of syslog servers for tracking. These new strengthened administrative capabilities add to the already rich security feature set already available in HCAP such as encryption for object ingestion, replication, and in-flight/at-rest over the SAN fabric.
As the growth of unstructured data including email, video and web content and office documents continues to skyrocket and new regulations require quick access to archived data, advanced, federated search capabilities across this disparate content is becoming increasingly important. New full-text search enhancements in the Hitachi Content Archive Platform deliver role-based access to search results and a logging of search activities, making it easier and faster to find unstructured, archived files. Working with the all-new Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (see separate press release also announced today), customers and partners are able to conduct federated search services across the Hitachi Content Archive Platform and Hitachi High-performance NAS Platforms—simplifying eDiscovery and data management.
Customers on the enhanced Hitachi Content Archive Platform:
ABN AMRO Hypotheken Group
"Hitachi Data Systems has a clear vision for how data should be handled," said Koen Teeuwisse, IT administration manager, ABN AMRO Hypotheken Group, one of the largest specialist mortgage providers in the Netherlands. "In the past, a major effort was required to collect all relevant documentation—mails, quotations, deeds—for a single mortgage. Now a single query will suffice to gather all of these documents. We have been able to achieve cost efficiencies by handling data in a more intelligent way. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform sees to it that we store exactly the right amount of data, neither too much nor too little. At the same time, the availability of our environment has increased and search queries can be handled more quickly and easily."
Hepler Broom
"We selected the Hitachi Content Archive Platform with Symantec Enterprise Vault to help reduce and maintain the size of our continuously growing Exchange database," said Jim Strubhart, information technology director, Hepler Broom, a law firm based in Edwardsville, IL. "The combined solution features tiered storage capabilities reducing backup and restore times for Exchange, and saving expensive storage space for more current data."
National Archives of Korea
"After rigorous testing and benchmarking, we selected the Hitachi Content Archive Platform and were very pleased with its availability and performance," said Gyu-Hyup, archives information team manager, National Archives of Korea. "We’ve now implemented the Hitachi Content Archive Platform as WORM devices for our record management system for archiving government documents."
Partners on the enhanced Hitachi Content Archive Platform:
Symantec
"As email and messaging systems become mission critical and file systems continue to grow, it becomes that much more important to have an email and file system archiving solution that will allow organizations to meet the demand on their crucial systems," said Simon Jelley, senior director Product Management, Symantec Enterprise Vault. "Combining the Hitachi Content Archive Platform with Symantec Enterprise Vault speeds the archival of business critical content to reduce management costs for source systems and at the same time scales to support legal discovery across all enterprise content."
Open Text
"With the growth of unstructured data, customers need archiving solutions that secure and protect business-critical information for the long-term, while controlling costs and retaining access to business data," said Franz Pauthner, vice president, Product Management at Open Text. "The integration of Open Text Enterprise Library Services and Hitachi Content Archive Platform helps customers reduce complexity and mitigate risk and expense in their archiving strategies, so that customers can gain maximum value from their investments."
SenSage
"As regulations for the telecommunications industry continue to increase in Europe, there is a growing need for our solutions," said Jim Pflaging, president and CEO of SenSage. "The SenSage security event data warehouse and the Hitachi Content Archive Platform are the ideal pairing to help customers more easily extract the necessary log files and event data sources to comply with these new regulations."
Procedo
"With the growth of unstructured data, customers are seeking an archiving solution that secures and protects business-critical information for the long-term while controlling costs," said Doug Larson of Procedo. "The integration of Procedo’s Atonomi Software Suite and the enhanced Hitachi Content Archive Platform helps customers migrate off any storage platform running any of the major email archiving solutions reducing complexity while mitigating risk and expense in their archiving strategies."
About Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation provides Services Oriented Storage Solutions that enable heterogeneous storage to be dynamically provisioned according to business needs and centrally managed via industry-leading Hitachi storage virtualization software. As an integral part of the Hitachi Storage Solutions Group, Hitachi Data Systems delivers storage infrastructure platforms, storage management software, and storage consulting services through direct and indirect channels in over 170 countries and regions. Its customers include nearly 60-percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, visit the company's Web site at 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 384,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2006 (ended March 31, 2007) consolidated revenues totaled 10,247 billion yen ($86.8 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.
Press Contact:
Hitachi Data Systems
Mary Ann Gallo
(408) 970-4836
mary.ann@hds.com
Investor Relations Contact:
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(408) 970-7097
laurie.spindler@hds.com
© 2008, 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.
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