Hitachi Content Platform Reviews

My job involves managing storage, like adding new hosts in our environment, creating users, zoning, and allocation. I completely decommission storage when a site is decommissioned and carry out all the DR activities, performance monitoring, tuning, and handling Hitachi universal replication. 

These are for the VSP areas and NAS activities like provisioning shares and capacity, as well as access management over the shares and file systems. These tasks are all done in Hitachi HNS. I use Hitachi Content Platform to manage namespaces, tenants, and pools.

This is a backup and storage project with a few tenants used for archival purposes. Data are sent for the archival, and data gets archived according to the retention period in their specific tenant. We have particular tenants that are used for data migration. It is integrated with our HNS platform. These are the two main purposes for Hitachi Content Platform.

We have about 50 people in my company working on HCP for this project, but my company has many projects, so I don't know who is using HCP for others. 

We can easily integrate Content Platform into our environment. We have G10 and S10 nodes. The metadata is stored in the pools that make up the G10 node, while the actual data goes to the pool that forms the S nodes. It has built-in data and capacity management, a background service that handles capacity balancing. It's scheduled to balance the data in each S node. 

We proposed its consultation to our clients and have explored it further. This is important because we partnered with HST, who provided a demonstration box and shipped it from UAE to Pakistan for the customers' proof of concept. 

We didn't connect with NetApp for this demo box, nor did they initiate such a campaign. We're showcasing it as a content platform because we have a free demonstration box, offering a more cost-effective solution compared to a full version.

Our key focus was integrating HCP with our client's existing robotics platform, tailoring it to their specific environment. They initially requested S3 object storage, which they hadn't used before, hence the proof of concept. 

It's more about exploration right now, with a potential decision later. They primarily wanted a centralized authority connecting all bank ATMs, providing access to diverse applications. They already have access through their existing unified storage. 

So, exploring HCP might be for introducing new products or services for their tenant customers, specifically the 200GB object storage, but that's still under exploration.

Integrating Hitachi Content Platform with existing systems is not challenging. 

For example, it's similar to how you share Google Drive with a tenant. You provide a specific web address, which might be a bit long, to individual users, user groups, or specific volumes. 

It's just like an internet storage app where you log in with your username and password, granting access as defined by the administrator.

The platform helps in efficient data management with the ease of server provisioning. 

They could improve compatibility and offer a more user-friendly GUI.

The product provides the fastest technology and stores different kinds of data in databases.

The software upgrade could be easier. At present, it is complicated to use the CLI command.

We are a service provider, so we propose this solution to customers.

You can deploy it on cloud or on-premise. You can buy some space from cloud service providers also. It also supports ST protocol.

Not all of the service providers have Hitachi Content Platform space available because it all depends on if they have Hitachi Content Platform deployed on their environment.

The pricing could be improved. Hitachi is a big company, so it's a very strong product. The only thing is that it should be more cost effective. 

Hitachi Content Platform is used by the customers for storing application data.

Hitachi Content Platform is a complicated solution. You need to put several pieces of the hardware together in order to achieve the capacity or the performance needed.

Mainly, from my project, Hitachi Content Platform is used for archiving. The customer is in banking, so they need to keep their long-term data on the platform. 

The platform is replacing their existing tech, which was using IBM Jaguar tech. The aim is to write on Jaggle Storage, which can be kept for about ten years and more.

The main selling point is its compatibility with different environments. It functions like an on-prem Google Drive or Dropbox built on top of the object storage. While it requires another license, it allows the creation of local cloud storage such as Dropbox and Google Drive. Additionally, Hitachi Content Platform is compatible with many platforms, even mainframes, which are challenging to integrate into other solutions.

I typically use it to back up an archive.

This solution has a ton of valuable features. One of the most hidden valuable features is ensuring that you don't have bit rot, so it will go and check every single object that's stored on the system, then ensure that if there's a problem, it'll be repaired from either a local copy or remote copy, depending upon your configuration.

It also has a variety of features for the metadata for the objects, so you can add additional searching, plus it has a good compliance feature set.