Hitachi Vantara has today at announced updates to the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio at its partner and user conference NEXT 2018.

The updates extend data governance, optimise for cloud and modernise file services to help organisations govern and protect their data in an increasingly complex multicloud environment.

These enhancements to the HCP portfolio help deliver business outcomes by maximising the power of data no matter where it resides – from the data centre to the cloud and out to the edge – and move them forward in today’s digital, data-driven business landscape.

Organisations recognise that data is the critical element to growth and innovation.

HCP is an object storage platform that manages data as a key business asset and govern it with integrated security to reduce compliance risks.

The new updates expand the capabilities of the HCP portfolio to help customers improve business productivity by making information available to users with strengthened security and data governance, while also helping to reduce costs across private and multicloud environments.

IDC file and object-based storage systems research manager Amita Potnis says, “Hitachi Vantara’s investment and innovations place the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio in a leadership position in the object-based storage market.”

“A recent study shows 56% of respondents plan to use private or multicloud platforms within the next 18 months.

Potnis adds, “The latest software updates give customers the ability to own and control how their data is stored, protected, governed and accessed across workloads, on-premises storage platforms and multiple public cloud deployments.”

Extend data governance to reduce risk in multicloud environments

HCP is an intelligent object storage platform based on robust compliance features, metadata-driven classification, indexing and full content search designed to lower compliance costs associated with ever-changing regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

HCP makes sensitive data tamper-resistant with the latest governance capabilities including:

• Compliance enforcement in the public cloud: New Amazon S3 extensions allow the use of HCP compliance capabilities, like retention and privileged delete, for application data ingested via the Amazon S3 application programming interface (API).
• Retention enhancements: Improved event-based retention to align with stringent requirements such as DoD 5015.02-STD – Electronic Records Management and SEC17a.
• Replication before tiering: Enhanced tiering-automation capabilities provide a global data protection level across multiple sites and improve data durability, optimise capacity and reduce costs.
• Protection against cybersecurity risks: HCP regularly undergoes third-party security audits and incorporates continuous, incremental updates to stay ahead of the latest threats. This factored into HCP winning the Fortress Cyber Security and Stratus Cloud Computing awards.

Optimised for the cloud: Drive down costs while increasing profitability

HCP delivers cost-optimised cloud object storage, performance and scale so that organisations can consolidate multiple application workloads onto a single platform.

This enables customers to centralise their data first, inventory it and determine the best location to store the data based on cost, sensitivity or value – on premises, in the cloud or both.

HCP can achieve over 60% lower storage costs over five years than using public cloud alone.

The latest features include:

• Cloud-native compatibility: HCP now adds even stronger compatibility with the industry-standard Amazon S3 API. This allows HCP to support new application requirements and an expanding ISV application ecosystem. Organisations can now use HCP with leading big data applications to deliver significant cost savings by offloading content from tier-one storage.
• Flexible deployment options: In addition to software-only and appliance models, new support for VMware vSAN allows HCP to be run in hyperconverged environments such as Hitachi Vantara’s Unified Compute Platform (UCP) to ensure availability, performance and reliability.
• Enhanced performance monitoring: With Hitachi Content Monitor, organisations can aggregate and visualise system metrics from multiple HCP clusters into customisable dashboards. This is essential to organisations when managing and governing data at scale and using the delivered insights to maintain optimal performance.

Modernising file services at the edge to improve productivity

Updates to Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere (HCP Anywhere) extend the boundaries of the digital workplace to deliver sync-based file services at the edge. HCP Anywhere allows organisations to replace traditional file servers with cloud file storage or cloud home directories.

It extends file-sharing data services from core data centres to remote and branch offices and end-user devices.

This improves both collaboration and productivity and enhances data protection against device failure, user error and attacks such as ransomware.

The new release of HCP Anywhere includes the following enhancements:

• Cloud file services: New HCP Anywhere Edge file services bring the innovative sync technology of HCP Anywhere for user devices to remote and branch offices. HCP Anywhere Edge is a cloud storage gateway option that helps right-size and consolidates file servers at the edge by keeping only active data in local storage while allowing easy access to large amounts of data from the private or hybrid HCP cloud in customers’ data centres.
• Native Microsoft Windows compatibility: HCP Anywhere Edge file services natively support Microsoft Windows SMB 2 and 3 to reduce management overhead and eliminate the complexity of integrating, updating, testing and supporting the latest Microsoft Windows updates.
• File data protection: HCP Anywhere Edge provides advanced data protection and easy recovery from user error, device failures and cyber attacks like ransomware while eliminating the need for traditional backups. It also simplifies and centralizes data protection and management for multiple-user and edge devices from a single point of management.

Hitachi Vantara emerging solutions and cloud services marketing vice president Linda Xu says, “The latest innovations to the Hitachi Content Platform portfolio allow customers to govern and protect their data in a multicloud environment.”

“As organisations’ cloud, governance and data accessibility requirements continue to evolve rapidly, HCP provides an adaptive, scalable and cost-efficient cloud storage platform that helps businesses organise their data, extract intelligence and safely share it with a globally dispersed workforce through a single point of visibility and control.”