Hitachi Data Systems has entered the "active archive" market with the Hitachi Content Archive Platform. with this solution the company strives to deliver open standards based interfaces, good scalability and enterprise class levels of data protection.

There are three basic reasons to archive:

• improving operational metrics yields the highest ROI of any storage management project
  
• for compliance - to keep your company officers out of jail
  
• and because the data is fundamental to generating revenue (e.g. medical records)

What all three have in common is an audit trail to insure information integrity, management policy to control retention and refresh, and the ability to search for and retrieve information when needed.

The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is an active archive solution comprised of both software and hardware, which
supports policy-based integration from many distributed or centralised repositories such as e-mail, file systems, databases, applications and content or document management systems. The system ensures secure archival-quality retention, preservation and verifiable destruction of content, allowing users to leverage a set of common and unified archive services such as centralised search, policy-based retention, authentication and protection.

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. In addition, the product stores files in their native form with original names to ensure easy access to and retrieval of data over time.

The platform scales to over 300 terabytes and supports 350 million files per archive. It can scale linearly with additional capacit. The system achieves a high degree of data protection by using storage functionality such as RAID in a storage area network (SAN) array of independent node (SAIN) architecture. With 4 gigabytes of cache per server, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform delivers up to 5 times better performance than first-generation CAS solutions.

Building on Hitachi Data Systems' Application Optimized Storage strategy of aligning storage resources with application requirements, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform provides an archive tier of storage where aged data on primary storage can be moved. Working with Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform or Network Storage Controller intelligent virtual storage controllers, data in the active archive can be offloaded from expensive disk to less-expensive ATA, SATA storage. The system can be controlled from a single management interface.
[As usual the devil is in the details, and those are not evident. This could be a step in the right direction but a lot depends on how things like data retention policies are actually implemented. Then again, almost anything would be better than current archiving solutions. --Ed].

Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.hds.com/products_services/content_archive_platform
www.hds.com
www.hitachi.com

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