Hitachi Takes On EMC In Active Archiving
Hitachi Takes On EMC In Active Archiving
June 14th, 2006: HDS lays out its archiving stall with aggressive digs at EMC's Content-Addressed Storage (CAS) Centerra platform. Open standards as its edge.
Three years into the battle for a fully-implementable data archiving solution, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announces its Content Archive Platform, calling it the '21st Century Digital Archiving Solution'.
The basics of the platform are:
• Highly available - no single point of failure
• SAIN Architecture
· Reliable SAN back-end storage
· Array of Independent Nodes
• Open standards-based access (CIFS/SMB, NFS, HTTP, WebDAV)
• Full-text indexing and search
• Set and adhere to retention policies
• Place content on legal hold
• User selected digital signatures for authenticity (MD-5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, RipeMD)
• Content immutability; WORM File System
• Self-healing and self-configuring
• Automatic load balancing
The system integrates software and hardware including:
Hitachi Content Archiver: based on software developed by Boston-based Archivas, is the software component providing policy-based control, authentication, preservation and protection. It runs on a pre-configured operating system.
Hitachi Content Archive Platform Storage - is the hardware component. The initial Hitachi Content Archive Platform configurations use TagmaStore Workgroup Modular Storage, model WMS100 SATA-based storage system.
The stand-outs that HDS is making, however, are aimed directly at EMC, the company that claims to have created the market three years ago with its Centerra platform.
Starting with the standards used for data archiving, HDS is opting for the open standards approach. According the company, "While first generation CAS solutions require a proprietary API to integrate content-producing applications with their systems, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform uses open, standards-based interfaces such as NFS, CIFS, WebDAV and HTTP as well as storage management standards such as SMI-S-saving companies money on additional development and training costs associated with proprietary APIs. In addition, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform stores files in their native form with original names to ensure easy access to and retrieval of data over time."
The HDS system also makes use of full-text search, across applications and across structured (for example XML-based) or unstructured (e.g. email). The company maintains that, '"Older archive approaches, either paper-based or electronic, acted as physically separate file cabinets. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is one of the few solutions that securely supports the archive of content from different applications, both commercial and home-grown systems, and structured and unstructured data into a single active archive architecture, while effectively eliminating redundant data across applications."
The third point of attack on what Adrian De Luca, Software Solutions Director, Australia & New Zealand, told IDM is, "the largest market we've seen in years", is 'No-Limit Scalability, Reliability and Performance'.
According to HDS this means, 'the Hitachi Content Archive Platform scales to over 300 terabytes and supports 350 million files per archive, and can scale linearly with additional capacity-allowing companies to stay ahead of their growing digital archive requirements. Using proven high-end Hitachi storage functionality such as RAID in a storage area network (SAN) + array of independent node (SAIN) architecture, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform ensures unrivalled data protection. With 4 gigabytes of cache per server, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform delivers up to 5 times better performance than first-generation CAS solutions.'
See this week's editorial Editorial for the implications of this injection of new technology to the market.
Related Article:
EMC Launches Enterprise Email Archiving Software