Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure and solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has announced a new distributed file system and management solution that will users gain faster access to and insights from unstructured data such as emails, documents, health records, audio, video and images.

The new solution will be delivered through a partnership with WekaIO (Weka), a developer of high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications.

Hitachi Vantara also announced an expansion of Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), its cloud object storage software solution for connecting data producers, users, applications and devices.

The new OEM relationship with Weka will enhance Hitachi Vantara’s portfolio with a high-performance, NVMe-native, parallel file system that the company will deliver tightly coupled to an HCP datastore. This performant network-attached storage (NAS) solution will be well suited for use with artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics applications across a broad array of industries.

The expansion of HCP also better supports next-generation unstructured workloads with performance-optimised all-flash HCP nodes. These new capabilities will deliver almost 3.4 times more throughput over Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) protocol, resulting in lowered costs of up to 34%.

Updated storage nodes also deliver an improvement of three times the read and write performance, while simultaneously enabling three times more capacity in the same rack space as the previous generation. This is especially significant as traditional NAS, primary workloads and cloud-native workloads are transitioning to object storage to meet high-performance requirements.

The new HCP expansion helps customers translate data into business insights faster, increase revenue from data generated by unstructured data, and improve application performance to drive a better digital experience for end users.

“Organisations that are striving to be data-driven are recognising the need to tap into vastly increasing amounts of unstructured data to gain a competitive edge,” said Brian Householder, president, Digital Infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara.

“Hitachi Vantara is helping our customers maximise their infrastructure advantage by delivering significant performance improvements when accessing and connecting their data to make faster and more accurate decisions.”

As the size and types of workloads are fundamentally changing, organisations need to focus not only on their ability to scale storage solutions, but also meet performance requirements. For example, at a typical Fortune 500 company, a mere 10% increase in data accessibility can result in more than $US65 million in additional net income.