Growth in digital content averages 52 percent annually, according to research firm IDC. As a result, managing information has become crucial to business viability, risk mitigation and corporate compliance in today’s business environment. This has led to a growing demand for sophisticated content archiving technologies and file services to enable organizations to cost-effectively manage their data from end to end.

The Hitachi Content Archive Platform provides organizations an affordable means to reduce their overall storage requirements and support fixed-content archiving, as well as adhere to increasingly stringent corporate governance policies. Designed to seamlessly integrate into an existing enterprise storage infrastructure, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform is an ideal solution for archiving reports, e-mail records, enterprise content management repositories, medical records, scanned documents, digital voice recordings and other digital content in an effort to reclaim primary storage and reduce backup windows.

“With the staggering growth of unstructured data that IDC forecasts in the next five years, organizations will face an unprecedented need for file-based storage that is more than a simple content store,” said Laura DuBois, Program Director for Storage Software, IDC. “Data custodians and legal and compliance professionals will need to more quickly and easily manage, locate and retrieve their content while assuring data integrity and longevity. Solutions like the Hitachi Content Archive Platform give users the tools they need to successfully meet those challenges.”

The Search Is On

As the growth of unstructured data — including e-mail, documents, video and Web content — continues to skyrocket and new regulations require quick access to archived data, advanced, federated search capabilities across this disparate content are becoming increasingly important. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform delivers role-based access to search results and a logging of search activities, making it easier and faster to find unstructured, archived files.

The Hitachi Content Archive Platform also enables customers to scale archive server nodes and storage capacity independently to address up to 80 petabytes in an archive system. To achieve this degree of scalability, other archiving solutions require many independent footprints, increasing their total cost of ownership. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform allows customers to leverage their existing storage infrastructure, consolidating the number of footprints to achieve high scalability while decreasing heat emissions and power consumption and simplifying management — resulting in greatly reduced TCO.

“The unprecedented partner and customer demand that we have experienced for the Hitachi Content Archive Platform is a direct reflection of the surge in unstructured data and the increasing need for high-performance, massively scalable storage solutions that are capable of finding the equivalent of a needle in a haystack in record time,” said Michael Hay, senior director, Product Strategy, Hitachi Data Systems. “Despite the exponential growth in data across all industries, businesses today are expected to transform both structured and unstructured data spread across their enterprise into business intelligence and actionable information upon a single request. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform delivers the speed, authentication, security and scalability organizations need to manage constant change and prepare for a future of unhindered data expansion.”

Meeting Compliance Demands

Today’s data retention, scalability, preservation and protection requirements are further complicated by a growing array of governmental regulations and corporate governance mandates. Certain sensitive data can only be viewed by senior executives while much broader access is needed for other information. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform provides advanced management tools and linkages to common authentication services, making it easier to administer access to the system.

All administrative functions are encrypted, and all administrative events are logged by unique login IDs. Multiple, configurable roles can be created and permissions assigned to each administrative login. In addition, system events can be broadcast and sent to a set of syslog servers for tracking. These administrative capabilities add to the rich security feature set available in Hitachi Content Archive Platform, such as encryption for object ingestion, replication, and in-flight/at-rest over the SAN fabric.

According to a recent global survey, 46 percent of Hitachi Content Archive Platform customers reported that consolidating storage was one of the primary drivers for purchasing the platform. Almost 70 percent of Hitachi customers have migrated more than 30 percent of their content off primary disk to the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, and 55 percent have experienced a return on their investment within 18 months.

“The huge growth of unstructured data and the need for companies to consolidate their storage and ‘do more with less’ means that archiving and long-term information management are now critical elements in the design and delivery of storage infrastructures,” said Sean Moser, Vice President of Software Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. “As evident by our continued global customer success, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform offers a cost-effective and simple end-to-end data archival system, and satisfies key requirements for long-term information preservation such as authentication, duplicate file elimination, scalable performance and capacity.”