Hitachi Data Systems Kickstarts Virtual Conference on Cloud Technologies

Opportunity to win exciting prizes through ‘Sharing Cloud Innovation’ video competition launched in conjunction with virtual conference


Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT) and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, launched a state-of-the-art virtual conference to drive awareness and education on their cloud strategy. This announcement comes on the heels of the recent launch of new agile cloud solution that combines best-in-class technologies from Hitachi Data Systems.

Addressing the challenge of ever-growing unstructured data, the virtual conference— accessed through www.hds.com/go/virtual-show—is an initiative that highlights the integrated, yet open, storage technologies evolving in cloud computing today. These technologies span a variety of workloads to support the diverse user applications. The conference demonstrates the effectiveness of the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) that provides essential security, reliability and multitenancy for cloud infrastructures. The technologies enable companies to adopt cloud services at their own pace.

The virtual conference will be operational for a period of four months starting from now. It takes visitors through a series on information pit-stops that acquaint them with Hitachi Data Systems technologies associated with cloud and HCP. Comprising interactive presentations by experts at Hitachi Data Systems, product demonstrations, and case studies, the virtual conference addresses the synergies of both cloud computing and HCP in achieving integration of storage management, lowering cost of ownership and increasing operational simplicity.

“Cloud computing - a natural progression from virtualization technology - is emerging as a key strategy for driving IT transformation in 2010. End-to-end server and storage virtualization and management, coupled with file and content services are going to be key enablers for a comprehensive cloud strategy,” said Ravi Rajendran, Vice President and General Manager for ASEAN, Hitachi Data Systems. “By leveraging Hitachi Data Systems’ Agile Cloud Portfolio, we are able to guide customers and service providers toward a public or private cloud environment that is cost-effective, scalable and secure.”

A novel social media campaign titled ‘Sharing Cloud Innovation’ is being launched in conjunction with the conference. Targeted at Facebook users, ‘Sharing Cloud Innovation’ is a video competition for individuals to submit a one-minute video highlighting their portrayal of cloud computing in an innovative and inspiring way. The winning video will be selected on the basis of both its popularity and judges’ discretion. Facebook users can ask their friends to press ‘Like’ to the posted videos on the Hitachi Data Systems ‘Sharing Cloud Innovation’ Facebook webpage. The creator of the most “Liked’ Video coupled with the judges’ decision will win two return air tickets to Tokyo, Japan. The video competition will run on Facebook from now until end of January 2010.

“Cloud computing offers a viable alternative to traditional long term approaches to compute capacity consumption and investment. Most cloud methodologies are not in tune with heterogeneous infrastructures of enterprises. The results are poorly utilized data silos, a situation that organizations tried to avoid in the first place. Our focus is on enabling a dynamic cloud environment that virtualizes all existing storage resources into a single, agile and services oriented infrastructure that reduces storage costs, mitigates risk and is easily managed in the face of changing demands. We hope that through the virtual conference, we can educate our customers and IT community at large on the benefits of this technology and how it can deliver benefits for a variety of industries,” said Sunil Chavan, Director, Content & File Services, Asia Pacific of Hitachi Data Systems.

Viewers registering for the conference can leave the questions, comments or messages on every presentation, video, and webcast that forms a part of the virtual conference. Attendees can also download content such as datasheets, whitepapers, and solution brochures from the interactive site.
Hitachi Cloud Customer Benefits

With sophisticated storage virtualization, Hitachi Data Systems enables a secure, multitenant environment that ensures privacy among various constituents within a shared infrastructure that can be managed from a single command suite. Supporting a variety of protocols and third party technology, enterprises and service providers can further leverage existing investments in hardware and software and allow legacy devices to inherit cloud attributes, thereby preventing cloud from becoming just another silo and eliminating the need for a complete refresh or update of hardware and software or the need to rewrite applications.

As a result, Hitachi Data Systems cloud solutions enable enterprise customers to choose the best possible technologies to address their challenges at their desired pace and budget resources. By offering an integrated set of cloud solutions, Hitachi Data Systems can deliver an agile cloud infrastructure that empowers customers to look at their existing IT infrastructure in new ways, enabling them to:
Provide efficient IT management and increase productivity through automation
Meet changing performance, availability and storage needs
Ensure security in a shared environment
Cost effectively improve data protection
Make information easy to locate and use, anywhere at any time
New Hitachi Content Platform and Cloud Enabling Technologies

Hitachi Data Systems best-in-class Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and award-winning Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage systems provide a single, virtual pool of storage with a host of key cloud attributes which can be provisioned against all types of IT services on demand. These services can be delivered via a number of fully integrated solutions including the recently announced Hitachi NAS Platform for file services, the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite for collaboration and search and the new Hitachi Content Platform for cloud storage, archiving, business continuity, creating content depots, consolidation and many other services. The Hitachi Content Platform also includes a number of advanced features that enable the solution to address a variety of challenges beyond the long term preservation of business critical information, such as:

Enabling Customers to Evolve Cloud at Their Own Pace: The new Hitachi Content Platform will serve enterprise content storage needs as well as public and private cloud environments within a single optimized cluster. Customers can adopt the cloud technologies based on their business needs, and they do not need to purchase another storage island for their cloud solution.

Segregating Data Securely: By providing a multitenant architecture, object versioning, retention and disposition services, encryption, immutability, high availability, search capabilities and much more, Hitachi Content Platform helps IT organizations securely segregate data within different namespaces to prevent unauthorized access and provide different service level agreements and features for different data sets.

Intelligently Tiering Data: Customers will be able to manage data growth from higher tier storage to a storage platform with features and capabilities that go beyond the traditional ‘archive’ and enable intelligent content storage for a number of use cases.