Hitachi Aims To Disrupt Industrial IoT Platform Market With New Commercial Lumada Software Stack

Fully Enhanced and Now Available as a Standalone Offering for IoT Developers and Architects, Hitachi’s Lumada Provides an Intelligent, Composable Platform That Delivers Faster Time to Insight and Business Value for Industrial and Enterprise Customers

Hitachi Ltd. (TSE:6501) and Hitachi Vantara, today jointly announced Hitachi’s first commercial Lumada internet of things (IoT) platform offering. Now in its v2.0 release, the Lumada IoT platform has been fully updated with an elegant, portable architecture that enables it to run both on-premises or in the cloud and to support industrial IoT deployments both at the edge and in the core.

The new software stack is designed to help customers quickly and easily gain insights, predictions and recommendations from their data, and can be easily adapted to support mid-to-large-scale environments. Lumada’s integrated advanced analytics have also been enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) functionality at scale. The result is a highly intelligent and flexible platform that accelerates superior outcomes for enterprise and industrial customers, such as increased operational efficiencies and cost savings, enhanced operational safety and reliability, improved asset utilization, performance management and product quality, and the creation of new business models.

Among the notable advancements to the Lumada IoT platform are asset avatars, Hitachi’s unique approach to what is commonly referred to as “digital twins.” Asset avatars provide a digital representation of physical assets and rich metadata for analytics, serving as a digital proxy for business and industrial assets and providing rapid data-driven insights into their health and performance, with continuously updated sensor values. This approach helps to eliminate “blind spots” in operation-critical systems by providing improved access to – and insights from – business, machine and human data, which can help users move more rapidly from measurement to management to improvement. The newly enhanced software stack also provides IoT developers and architects with powerful design tools and features that simplify the creation and deployment industrial IoT solutions, with faster time to insight.

Since introducing Lumada to the market as a co-creation platform in May 2016, Hitachi has hardened and optimized its Lumada IoT platform. These improvements are based on numerous deployments in proof-of concept (POC) and co-creation project engagements with its customers and partners, as well as in its own factories. 

Hitachi worked with customer Daicel Corporation to co-create an image analysis system using Lumada that improves product quality and increases productivity by detecting signs of facility failures and deviations in front-line worker motions. This system has allowed Daicel to improve the in-process guarantee rate for products. 

Another customer, Okuma Corporation, worked with Hitachi to co-create an advanced high-efficiency production model with Hitachi to support mass customization in its manufacturing plants. The target of this joint demonstration experiment is to double productivity and reduce production lead time by 50%. 

Based on the best practices developed throughout projects like these, Hitachi has enhanced Lumada’s functionality to simplify management of business and industrial assets, support greater asset utilization and accelerate the time to value of IoT deloyments. Its next generation architecture is highly flexible, composable and adaptable to support customers’ existing business and IT environments and help them to more rapidly achieve highly optimized outcomes. 

Customers looking to accelerate their IoT initiatives using Lumada will benefit from engaging Hitachi’s co-creation services, tapping its expansive expertise in both operation technology (OT) and information technology (IT) to create customized IoT solutions that are tailored to their unique requirements.

“Our next-generation Lumada IoT platform demonstrates Hitachi’s unparalleled expertise in both OT and IT, and reinforces Hitachi’s commitment to being an innovation partner for our customers in the IoT era,” said Keiji Kojima, chairman at Hitachi Vantara and senior vice-president and exective officer at Hitachi Ltd. “With the powerful advancements delivered today, our customers and partners can now choose to harness the full power of Lumada’s AI, advanced analytics and asset avatars capabilities to simplify their own IoT solution development or to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives in co-creation projects with Hitachi. In either case, we believe Hitachi is delivering a highly intelligent and unique solution that challenges the industrial IoT platform market status quo.” 

Hitachi’s next-generation Lumada IoT platform architecture has been fully updated with five major layers to form a flexible, portable and composable software foundation with comprehensive security capabilities and expanded support for unstructured data uploads. IoT developers and architects will also benefit from Lumada’s dynamic design features, rich analytics and robust asset management capabilities, including:

• Lumada edge: Allows any variety and velocity of data to be easily ingested, transformed and analyzed in close proximity to physical assets.
• Lumada core: Provides asset registry, identity and access management and simplifies the creation of asset avatars.
• Lumada analytics: Blends OT and IT data to uncover patterns with powerful analytics, machine learning and AI.
• Lumada studio: Delivers predefined widgets to simplify the creation of dashboard applications; issues alerts, notifications or just straight-through processing.
• Lumada foundry: Offers foundational services to ease deployment on-premises and in the cloud, as well as security, microservices and support features.

“We are exceedingly proud of the next-generation Lumada software stack we are delivering to the market and opening up to developers today,” said Rich Rogers, senior vice-president of engineering and product management at Hitachi Vantara. “However, Hitachi’s intention is that Lumada will be much more than just another IoT platform in a crowded market. Lumada’s ultimate purpose is to make it simple to harness the power of IoT data to drive real value for Hitachi’s customers and partners. We remain committed to delivering exceptional integrated software, solutions and services for Lumada. Our vision is that one day all Hitachi machines will be connected to it, enriching the data-driven insights and value we can provide to ensure every Hitachi customer will benefit.”

Product Availability and Information

Hitachi’s Lumada IoT platform software is generally available now for purchase and in co-creation engagements with Hitachi and select partners. Some features may not be immediately available in all markets. For more information and a complete list of product and feature enhancements, visit https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/products/internet-of-things/lumada.html. 

Experience Hitachi’s Lumada IoT Platform at NEXT 2017

Hitachi’s new Lumada IoT platform software and related solutions will be on display at the company’s user conference, Hitachi NEXT, in Las Vegas, September 19and 20, 2017. Event attendees can see live demonstrations of the software and the innovative IoT solutions Hitachi and its customers and partners are developing with it. 

The event also features a full track of IoT developer breakout sessions, providing attendees with an opportunity to engage directly with Hitachi product management executives and development teams. The developer breakout session will provide a deep dive on the latest architectural advancements, design features and best practices for building industrial and commercial enterprise IoT solutions with Lumada. For more information, visit www.hitachinext.com. 

Hitachi Introduces Hitachi Vantara: A New Digital Company Committed to Solving the World’s Toughest Business and Societal Challenges

Company Formed to Help Customers Achieve Unprecedented Outcomes by Tapping the Full Potential of Their Data

Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501, "Hitachi") today launched Hitachi Vantara, a new business entity to leverage the broad portfolio of innovation, development and experience from across Hitachi Group companies to deliver data-driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises. This new company will unify the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business as Hitachi Vantara to capitalize on Hitachi’s social innovation capability in both operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT).

More Than a Century of OT Expertise Combined with IT Trusted by the World’s Largest Enterprises

Hitachi has been a leader in OT for industries such as finance, government, manufacturing, power/energy and transportation for over 100 years, providing solutions that have positively impacted cities, industrial operations and businesses at large. The company has also been a leader in IT for over 50 years—bringing IT applications, analytics, content, cloud, and infrastructure solutions to market that have transformed the way enterprises do business. Combining Hitachi’s broad expertise in OT with its proven IT product innovations and solutions, Hitachi Vantara gives customers a powerful, collaborative partner in data – unavailable in any one company until today.

“Hitachi Vantara marks a monumental change for Hitachi as we continue to advance our unified corporate vision of Social Innovation,” said Hitachi, Ltd. President and CEO Toshiaki Higashihara. “Hitachi has been helping customers harness the power of their data to support meaningful business action for years. Now as the world is being transformed by digital tools and processes, we are unifying our strongest digital solutions companies together as a new Hitachi company that delivers exponential business impact for our customers and the betterment of society. The formation of Hitachi Vantara underscores Hitachi’s commitment to  collaborative creation with customers and partners, and being a true innovation partner for the era of IoT.”

The Opportunity in Data

Hitachi Vantara is uniquely able to help customers extract all the value their data has to offer. By bringing new data-driven solutions and services to market, Hitachi Vantara will help its customers achieve tangible outcomes that positively drive business and society forward.

The market opportunity for mission-critical data solutions has never been greater. Data has become a businesses’ greatest asset—if they can extract actionable insights from it. Data holds the key to new revenue streams, better customer experiences, improved market insights and lower costs of doing business. However, a comprehensive offering has yet to emerge that combines both OT and IT expertise to uncover its true potential—until now.

Filling a Critical Gap in the Emerging IoT Market

Hitachi Vantara will continue to provide superior infrastructure and analytics technologies that enterprises rely on for their mission-critical data in their data centers, in the cloud and at the edge of new innovations. The new company is targeting the emerging IoT market opportunity, in which there is no clear winner yet.

According to Gartner, Inc., “more than $440 billion will be spent on IoT in 2020,”[1] and the firm estimates that by 2020, “there will be more than 21 billion connected sensors and endpoints, and digital twins will exist for potentially billions of things.”[2] in the same timeframe. To address this market, Hitachi Vantara will harness business, human and machine data across OT and IT environments to build comprehensive, data-driven solutions. Customers will be able to manage, store, govern, blend, analyze, and visualize data—and then take action based on uncovered insights.

Hitachi Vantara’s Breadth of Solutions: From the Data Center to the Factory Floor

Hitachi Vantara will continue to develop the trusted data management and analytics technologies Hitachi is known for, including Hitachi’s popular data infrastructure, storage and compute solutions, and Pentaho software. It will also be driving the development of strategic software and services solutions, including Hitachi Smart Data Center software and services, Lumada, Hitachi’s IoT platform, now available as a standalone, commercial software offering, and Hitachi co-creation services. Announced concurrently today and now in its 2.0 release, Lumada has been fully updated with enhanced artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and advanced analytics capabilities. It also has an elegant, portable architecture that enables it to run both on-premises or in the cloud, and supports industrial IoT deployments both at the edge and in the core.

The company will focus on serving global Fortune 1000 companies with best-in-class data management, infrastructure, content and analytics products and industrial IoT solutions for a number of industries including financial services and insurance, government, industrials/manufacturing, telecom, and transportation.

“No other company brings together more than a century of operational technology expertise with informational technology trusted in the world’s most demanding enterprise environments,” said Hitachi Vantara CEO, Ryuichi Otsuki. “Hitachi Vantara capitalizes on this unique combination by creating solutions that meet the needs of an increasingly connected world. Like our customers with whom we partner and co-create, Hitachi Vantara sees data as an opportunity—a path to outcomes that matter.”

Hitachi’s new Lumada IoT platform and Smart Data Center solutions will be on display at the Hitachi NEXT 2017 user conference in Las Vegas, September 19 and 20, where event attendees can see live demonstrations of the company’s software and IoT solutions. For more information, visit HitachiNEXT.com.

Hitachi Accelerates Customers’ Hybrid Cloud Initiatives with Enhanced Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Offerings

New Hitachi UCP RS Offering Integrates VMware Cloud Foundation to Simplify Hybrid Cloud Journey

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501) and VMware Global Innovation OEM Partner of the Year, today announced Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) RS series, a fully integrated, software-defined data center (SDDC) rack-scale platform, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation™. Hitachi UCP RS enables customers to embrace hybrid cloud for faster time to market and pay-as-you-go economics. It also gives customers the freedom to optimize their IT investments by leveraging private and public cloud as an agile extension to their business. UCP RS provides flexibility to customers to either deploy integrated SDDC stack or build their own using Hitachi’s vSAN ready node and VMware software.

Alongside the launch of Hitachi UCP RS, the company has enhanced its hyperconverged system Unified Compute Platform (UCP) HC. Hitachi UCP HC all-flash and hybrid systems are now enabled with non-volatile memory (NVMe) and new sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors to deliver faster performance and reduced operating costs, maximizing business value for customers. This enhancement allows for higher performance, lower latency and accelerated workloads through the use of modern data center technology.

John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, Integrated Systems, VMware said, “Hitachi’s strong track record of innovation led them to be recognized as VMware Global Innovation OEM Partner of the Year at VMware Partner Leadership Summit 2017. This new Hitachi UCP RS solution powered by VMware Cloud Foundation is no exception. The solution improves productivity, delivers faster time to business value and accelerates the customer’s ability to realize the true power of their data.”

“Open questions exist regarding the extent to which advances in SDI technology can support a common virtual data center foundation upon which improved end-to-end IT service interoperability, resilience, elasticity and agility across a hybrid cloud infrastructure can be effectively realized,” according to Market Trends: Software-Defined Infrastructure — Who Can Benefit? (Gartner, June 2017). In addition, the report states that, “Given the current state of public cloud service deployment and the maturity state of SDI, one of two options is possible: The first is an application-independent, common virtual data center infrastructure that can run atop an existing private data center infrastructure, a public cloud service or a combination of the two. This variation is called infrastructure-upward.”

Understanding the new demands placed on IT by data center modernization initiatives, Hitachi has collaborated with VMware to develop the fully integrated, turnkey Hitachi UCP RS system to deliver reliable IT infrastructure for hybrid cloud deployments. Hitachi UCP RS also helps to minimize the complexity and guesswork of deploying and managing IT by uniquely automating provisioning, managing and monitoring for SDDCs, giving customers acompetitive advantage, and delivering faster time to market and high availability of business applications.

“Our deep, collaborative partnership with VMware has led to the creation of powerful systems and innovative solutions that help our customers modernize their IT environments and put data at the center of their business,” said Bob Madaio, vice president of Integrated Solution Marketing at Hitachi. “With the launch of our UCP RS in addition to advancements in our hyperconverged UCP HC, Hitachi is empowering our customers to transform their IT environments, accelerate hybrid cloud deployments and further their digital business initatives.”

Hitachi UCP Portfolio

The UCP family of converged, hyperconverged and rack-scale systems provides enterprise, departmental and cloud service provider environments with a simple path to IT modernization and digital transformation. UCP solutions enable IT organizations to accelerate time to production, automate operations and reduce administrative costs by providing prevalidated, pretested and factory-built converged and hyperconverged infrastructure systems.

Product Availability

Hitachi UCP RS is generally available to customers and partners now in all regions. For more information, visitwww.hds.com/en-us/products-solutions/converged-infrastructure/unified-compute-platform-rs.html.

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Hitachi Transformation Award Finalists Announced

Press release

Award Recognizes Customers Who Are Driving Transformation and Using Digitalization as a Strategic Advantage

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501), announces the finalists for the Hitachi Transformation Award to be awarded at NEXT 2017, the premier event for the digital revolution. NEXT 2017 will be held September 18-21, 2017 in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This first annual award recognizes leading companies that are transforming their businesses in new and innovative ways, with the support of Hitachi group solutions. Five finalists and four honorable mentions have been selected based on the substantial benefits they have achieved through accelerating business transformation, improving user experience, innovating with data, and enabling the internet of things (IoT).

The following finalists are exemplary models of how digital transformation accelerates business outcomes:

Award Finalists

• CPFL Energia: With over nine million electricity consumers connected to nine distribution companies, CPFL decided to convert to a Hitachi smart grid universe. With automation spread across their networks, they needed to speed up their mission-critical database to keep up with the enormity of their technical and business challenges. Hitachi helped them assure high quality services and safety for their customers.

• Curtin University: Curtin is making campus operations smarter and bringing innovation to Western Australia with data-driven research. By analyzing people’s movements in and out of classrooms and linking data sets, they will optimize building usage, capacity needs and schedules. Through co-creating solutions with Hitachi, Curtin can use data to lower costs, improve student retention and create a more effective, contemporary learning experience.

• Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA): How do you optimize livestock production? With data. Through MLA investment, Hitachi’s sensor-driven data collection and analytics helps the red meat industry identify best practices for animal tracing, supply chain efficiency, and on-farm operations. By automating data analytics and driving IoT- led decision making, MLA is helping foster the productivity and profitability of the Australian red meat and livestock industry.

• Spin Master: Transforming into the fourth-largest toy manufacturer and children’s entertainment powerhouse is not child’s play. Spin Master has adapted to strategically support innovation, acquisitions, new brands, and continued business expansion. With Hitachi’s assistance, they reduced SAP processing time, created significant savings, and gained a 360-degree view of their customers. Now they’re pushing the boundaries of innovation, creativity and fun further and faster.

• Wiggle: Wiggle, the leading e-commerce sports retailer, knew their inefficient processes and a range of custom systems could not support their ambitious growth plans. Working with Hitachi, they developed a cloud-based, sophisticated retail platform to standardize operations and support their global strategy. Staying customer-centric, with a single customer view, better process efficiencies and soaring customer satisfaction, they leave others trailing behind.

The award winner will be announced on September 20^th at NEXT 2017. The five finalists’ stories will be featured throughout the event, showcasing the business outcomes they have achieved from their transformation journeys.  Hitachi is proud to partner with these outstanding companies and honor their accomplishments.

Additionally, Hitachi recognizes the following honorable mentions for their stories of transformation:

Honorable Mentions

• Daicel Corporation: Daicel, a chemicals and manufacturing expert, improved quality and lowered costs with an integrated smart manufacturing solution co-created with Hitachi.

• Equifax Incorporated: Equifax worked with Hitachi on a software-defined infrastructure with analytics to improve efficiency, resulting in higher uptime and customer experience. 

• Salford Royal NHS Trust: Salford Royal worked with Hitachi to prevent Type 2 diabetes with technologies designed to enhance care and support lifestyle changes.

• The University of Utah Health: University of Utah Health worked with Hitachi to streamline IT environments, improve data analytics and ensure all data is secure.

NEXT 2017 Registration

Registration for NEXT 2017 is now live! The $795 ticket is available at the introductory price of $299. To register to attend Hitachi NEXT 2017, please visit HitachiNEXT.com. Registered attendees will receive dynamic updates on new additions to the agenda in the weeks leading up to the event.

For questions about press or analyst registration, please contact Stefani Finch.

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Hitachi Transformation Award

Hitachi Named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays

Hitachi Moves from Challengers Quadrant to Leaders Quadrant; Evaluation Based On Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501), today announced it has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the July 2017 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays by Gartner, Inc., a leading global research firm. Hitachi believes its significant growth and enhancements to its all-flash Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) F Series product line resulted in the company improving its position, moving it from the Challengers Quadrant to the Leaders Quadrant.

According to Gartner: “Vendors in the Leaders Quadrant have the highest scores for their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. A vendor in the Leaders Quadrant has the market share, credibility, and marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. These vendors demonstrate a clear understanding of market needs; they are innovators and thought leaders; and they have well-articulated plans that customers and prospects can use when designing their storage infrastructures and strategies. In addition, they have a presence in all four major geographical regions, consistent financial performance and broad platform support.”

Hitachi’s continued investments in the development of its flash software and hardware technologies have resulted in the delivery of a superior enterprise storage offering for its customers, backed by the most flash-related patents in the industry. Hitachi VSP F1500, which first debuted in October 2016, was purpose-built for businesses with large-scale data management requirements—including mainframe. It provides seamless cloud tiering, integrated analytics software and a unique 100-percent data availability guarantee. All VSP F series models are enhanced with flat service pricing, ongoing media replacement, and quality of service (QoS) controls to provide consistent performance over time. For customers in highly regulated industries or where data security is mission critical, the VSP F series conforms with secure data eradication services and meets the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) data security control standards.

“Hitachi takes pride in bringing continuous breakthroughs to market that help our customers to be as competitive as possible in the digital age,” said Ryuichi Otsuki, CEO of Hitachi Data Systems. “We are pleased to be recognized as a leader in the solid-state array industry and we will continue to challenge industry standards, while positioning our customers to succeed.”

To download a complimentary copy of the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays report, visit:https://www.hds.com/ext/magic-quadrant-for-solid-state-arrays.html

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Hitachi Content Platform Portfolio Transforms Cloud Infrastructure To Achieve Over 60% TCO Savings Versus Public Cloud

Press release

Enable Multi-Cloud Environment On Your Terms with Hitachi Object Storage Solutions 

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501), announced major updates to the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio, providing a path to digital transformation for enterprises while achieving significant cost savings over public cloud. The integrated portfolio offers the capability to increase profitability and productivity through cloud economics and by applying analytics to uncover new opportunities and insights. It also can reduce risk by enhancing security, availability and data protection.

With this release, HCP gains a 400 percent increase in usable storage per cluster, 67 percent more storage node capacity via 10TB drives, a 55 percent increase in objects per node and simplified software licensing so customers can achieve over 5x lower storage costs than public cloud, which leads to over 60% TCO savings than public cloud for enterprise use cases. 

“Once again, we’ve raised the bar for object storage with our uniquely integrated Hitachi Content Platform portfolio. Hitachi Content Platform provides the ideal ecosystem to support customers’ existing content-centric applications and newer cloud use cases and workloads simultaneously. It also provides a central way for customers to securely incorporate hybrid cloud storage on their terms to react faster to change and to optimize costs.” -- Peter Sjoberg, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud and Mobility, Hitachi Data Systems

The HCP portfolio is a unique end-to-end solution that eliminates silos; promotes collaboration; enables governance and compliance; provides safeguards for sensitive data; automates management in private, hybrid and multicloud environments; and surfaces insights through sophisticated search and analytics. The HCP portfolio includes Hitachi Content Platform for software-defined object storage; HCP Anywhere for file synchronization and sharing and data protection capabilities; Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI), an elastic-scale cloud file gateway; and Hitachi Content Intelligence, where rapid insights emerge from your data.

“At MCIS, Inc., we are a healthcare information technology company dedicated to delivering and managing innovative products and services. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Marshfield Clinic Health System (MCHS), MCIS products and services deliver better outcomes at lower costs across the system. Hitachi helped us decrease costs with the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio’s native, self-healing capabilities, which removed the need for traditional backups. We’ve expanded with Hitachi to include other medical imaging sources and as a replacement of traditional backups for large static datasets within MCHS. The flexible security, multi-tenant support, and built-in encryption, combined with other products from the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio, have also allowed us to realize true cost savings by enabling us to repurpose existing primary storage capacity, deferring budgeted upgrades and delaying new purchases.” -- Tim Buss, Vice President, Infrastructure Services and Chief Technology Officer, Marshfield Clinic Information Services (MCIS)

“Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen is committed to leveraging innovative IT solutions to provide the best healthcare to our patients. Over the past four years, Hitachi Content Platform has consistently delivered value as a highly scalable cloud-based clinical repository that can integrate with any clinical system. Furthermore, the healthcare data stored on HCP is readily available, which has drastically improved the speed and quality of our response to patient emergencies. We are excited about the addition of Hitachi Content Intelligence to the HCP product portfolio based on the potential to use sophisticated analytics to accelerate diagnoses.” -- Elmar Flamme, CIO, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen

“The challenges surrounding unstructured data growth has triggered a renaissance in object storage; both on-premises and in the cloud. The key to next-generation data management lies in collecting the high quality metadata needed to provide enhanced data visibility, automation and policy-based management regardless of where the data may physically reside. The economics of storage are evolving, and the smart move may be to start with an on-prem object storage framework that best matches company needs and is extensible to public cloud options; rather than the other way around.” -- Steven Hill, Senior Storage Analyst, 451 Research

Hitachi Content Platform Updates

As traditional organizations transform to compete with companies born in the digital era, they need a cloud-driven infrastructure for greater agility. With this release, HCP gains a 400 percent increase in usable storage per cluster, 67 percent more storage node capacity via 10TB drives, a 55 percent increase in objects per node and simplified software licensing so customers can achieve over 5x lower storage costs than public cloud alone. Customers can also take advantage of enhanced multipart file transfers to speed performance of large file uploads, downloads and range reads for Amazon cloud storage applications. APIs have also been enhanced to give organizations greater visibility to analyze the performance and health of their infrastructure.

For today’s always-on IT environments, HCP offers several reliability, availability, security and flexibility improvements. HCP adds geo-distributed erasure coding for multisite deployments, resulting in lower capacity overheads, reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), and faster rebuilds. Corrupted files are restored from storage across geographies, rather than from redundant sites, which maintains availability during adverse events, such as a large-scale outage. HCP users may choose the right  combination of data protection options including local and geographically distributed erasure coding, RAID and replication based on their business, regulatory and performance requirements. This release also includes a variety of customer-driven enhancements to further extend existing serviceability and monitoring capabilities. To provide customers with even greater flexibility, HCP has added KVM Hypervisor support to further improve the total cost of ownership and extend software-defined capabilities. To address security-conscious customer needs, HCP has added a dedicated management port that isolates user and administrator network traffic for an added level of security.

Hitachi Data Ingestor Updates

With Hitachi Data Ingestor, organizations can greatly reduce risk, cost and complexity of providing IT services to geographically dispersed locations and cloud users. New features include multipart file transfers to HCP for faster uploads of large files such as videos. Other enhancements include: easier resolution of content sharing conflicts, universal file migration improvements that boost performance, and updated cryptographic hash algorithms to further protect data. 

Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere Updates

This announcement builds on HCP Anywhere updates announced last month to enable organizations to advance their digital workplace experience in a way that incorporates existing content repositories; delivers next-generation file sharing, collaboration and data protection capabilities; simplify searches; and provides APIs to design new workflows and customize the user experience. For additional details, the full release is availablehere.

Hitachi Content Intelligence

Announced in November 2016, this search and analytics solution is the latest addition to the portfolio which allows organizations to exploit the value of their data. The Hitachi Content Platform portfolio is the only offering that allows organizations to bring together object storage, file sync and share, cloud storage gateways, and sophisticated search and analytics to create a tightly integrated, simple and smart cloud storage solution.  For additional details the full release is available here.

Enrico Signoretti, Head of Product Strategy at OpenIO, in a March 2017 Gigaom report called Sector Roadmap: Object storage for enterprise capacity-driven workloads, wrote the following: “The HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) is one of the most successful enterprise object storage platforms in the market. It has more than 1700 customers, with an average cluster capacity between 200 and 300TB. … Alongside the hardware ecosystem, HDI (remote NAS gateway) and HCP Anywhere (Sync & Share) stand out for the quality of their integration and feature set.”

Hitachi Data Systems is a sponsor at the Cloud Expo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City.

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