Hitachi Offers Cloud Storage… On Users’ Own Sites!

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is offering a “cloud”  storage service that contradicts most expectations of the cloud – by keeping the data inside the customer’s firewall and managing it remotely. The company is also working with Digi Data to offer true cloud storage infrastructure that service providers can sell.

The so-called “private file tiering” service saves a user from upgrading their storage area network (SAN), by offloading inactive data onto a private cloud, remotely managed by HDS. By using this pay-per-use storage, the customer avoids expensive SAN upgrades, said Lynn Collier, EMEA director of software for HDS.

All the benefits… or none?

“In our experience, many customers are not as yet ready to move data or applications into a true cloud environment,” Collier told eWEEK Europe. “We are offering them all the benefits within their own firewall. They get the attributes of a cloud service, but the infrastructure resides at the customer’s site.

On the face of it, Hitachi’s offering would seem to lose the efficiency and flexibility of the cloud, since the storage it uses can’t be pooled and managed with other customers’ resources. At the same time, since the storage is managed remotely, a customer has to go through an extra layer of admin to fix a physical disk they can see in front of them.

Collier denied these objections, saying that she found users were in fact gagging for the new service, in pre-briefings. The tiering service can include thin provisioning and be extended out to include a whole managed storage option, which would create a private cloud that would generate efficiencies across the user’s whole storage estate.

And the extra level of management is not a drawback but an advantage, to a CIO whose staff are too busy and don’t have the expertise to manage the private cloud: “They have so much to manage at the moment, having some of that pain and burden taken away from them, with a service level agreement in place, is a benefit.”

Cost-saving move

Fundamentally, this offering sounds like a cost-saving move, offering users a hope of avoiding capital expenditure on storage. “Storage needs are growing at 25 to 30 percent a year, and customers don’t want to have to buy new NAS heads and the storage behind them,” said Collier.

By tiering data out of the primary environment, onto hardware that is bought as a service, the customer avoids some heavy capital expenditure. Although it does increase the operational expenditure bill in future, the all-important total cost of ownership (TCO) would go down, she assured eWEEK Europe.

It’s also a safe step towards the cloud, as data put onto this private cloud can easily be transferred to public clouds, she said, should companies come to terms with the regulatory or jurisdictional issues that make them fear cloud storage at the moment.

“As the industry matures, they can move from one cloud service into another,” she said. “We don’t lock customers in, in any way with proprietary data collection or distribution.”

Working with Digi-Data, Hitachi is also offering a public online cloud storage solution that will allow service providers to offer cloud storage to consumers and small-to-medium businesses – but Collier emphasised that HDS would not be getting into the business of offering this kind of public cloud directly to customers.

For anyone with questions about all this, HDS’ cloud guru Miki Sandorfi (@mikisandorfi) is discussing cloud storage on Twitter today using the hashtack #HDSchat.