Recently, Hitachi Data Systems aligned its product and solutions portfolio around a three-tiered strategy focused on the cloud. This consists of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud that Hitachi says will build on existing IT investments to provide a single virtualization platform for all data.

While the infrastructure cloud will help enterprises unify server, storage and networking silos, the content cloud will use intelligent tools to enable data indexing, search and discovery across data types. The third component, called the information cloud, has the capability to connect data sets, reveal patterns across them and bring to surface actionable information and new insights to business users.

The information cloud has been launched at a time, when organizations are finding it exceedingly difficult to handle vast amounts of data. For example, a recent survey conducted by Hitachi Data Systems in association with market analyst firm, IDC revealed that about 70 percent of respondents in India believed that the demand of the business for deeper analysis outpaces the ability for their systems to ensure the data they have is relevant, timely and useful. In other words, their data growth is outpacing their ability to effectively manage it.

Making sense of unstructured data

A major contributor to this heady growth of storage is related to unstructured data, which can come in the form of e-mails, videos or medical records. “The biggest challenge is undoubtedly unstructured data, which is growing at 10 times the rate at which traditional data is growing. The competitiveness of organizations will be determined by how will they govern, manage and leverage this data for taking decisions,” says Kevin Eggleston, Senior Vice President and GM, Hitachi Data Systems Asia-Pacific.

Eggleston says that the biggest advantage that Hitachi has today is that it can help customers get business insights from their data, even if it is stored across different data systems from different vendors. For example, using the content cloud, content can be stored independently from the application that created it. The lifespan of some data can be 30 years or more, while the applications that created the data may only exist for a few years. Hence, it is critical to free the data from the underlying application. Once freed, the data can be further analyzed to reveal intelligent insights.

A case in point is Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen, one of the largest hospitals in Austria. The hospital is using the content cloud to consolidate patient information for its lab, radiology and unstructured content management systems, and associated metadata, to provide a consolidated view to its National eHealth application and the hospital's own clinician portal.

“You cannot deliver insights from Big Data unless you look at all the sources of information. With information cloud, we are talking about a system that looks more like a global file system, and customers could seek intelligent insights by combining information from different data sources on the fly,” says Eggleston.

By analyzing unstructured data such as CT scans or video surveillance recordings in the cloud, we can decipher several interesting insights.

Kevin Eggleston, Senior Vice President and GM, Hitachi Data Systems Asia-Pacific

While Hitachi is not a traditional analytics player, it believes that it is not far behind other traditional players, as analytics is still not defined or mature with respect to unstructured data. As Hitachi used object-based storage, it has the capability to not only store unstructured data, but also the associated metadata, that describes the object. Objects can be in the form of CT scans or video surveillance recordings.

“By analyzing unstructured data such as CT scans or video surveillance recordings in the cloud, we can decipher several interesting insights. For example, by comparing and analyzing thousands of video surveillance recordings or CT scans, we can draw business value and find patterns, which previously could not be identified,” explains Eggleston. Hitachi believes it has an edge in this area, as it can leverage the domain expertise of its parent group, which has presence across different sectors such as energy, healthcare, urban transportation and utility.

Hitachi Data Systems is already on a fast growth track in India. The Asia-Pacific region happens to be the fastest growing region for Hitachi Data Systems, and India leads the growth in the region. With the three-tier strategy, Hitachi is well positioned to reap the benefits of a converged play, and sustain the momentum.