Hitachi Takes on EMC For Content Addressable Storage

May 31, 2007: Hitachi’s data systems arm has released a swag of enhancements to its digital archiving platform, saying version two of its content addressed storage (CAS) solution is the bees knees when it comes to data retention, preservation and protection.

Taking a swing at EMC’s Centera, Hitachi Data Systems says it has made a host of breakthroughs in storage virtualisation, thin provisioning, scalability and data de-duplication.

HDS claims that the platform can support up to 20 petabytes in an 80 node archive system, with a single Hitachi Content Archive Platform node scaling up to 400 million objects (files + metadata + policies), and an 80-node system supporting up to 32 billion objects. The company also claims that the platform delivers up to 470-percent greater performance than first-generation CAS solutions.

“The features and flexibility of a content archive solution are of paramount importance to today’s businesses which are required to store, manage and secure an exploding amount of data,” said Jack Domme, Hitachi Data Systems’ chief operating officer. “Since Hitachi’s acquisition of Archivas in February of this year, we have fully integrated the company’s roadmap.

“As opposed to burdening customers by introducing yet another island of storage for content archives and another set of software tools and management interfaces, we are delivering unique content archive services within a common management framework that enables customers to take advantage of the established heterogeneous storage virtualisation services already available from Hitachi,” added Domme.

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