Hitachi Adds Enterprise Search to Object Store

Hitachi Data Systems today debuted Content Intelligence, a new offering that adds a slew of enterprise search and analytic capabilities to its object-based file system.

The new Hitachi Content Intelligence (HCI) offering bolsters the company’s object storage system, dubbed Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), the centerpiece of the company’s scale-out data management strategy that’s used by 1,700 customers around the world. Like all object stores, HCP enables customers to store large volume of multi-structured data in a single address space, thereby helping them to push back against the siloed data sprawl and limits of file- and block-based storage.

With the addition of HCI, Hitachi is adding features like enterprise search, data discovery, and governance to the HCP object store, with the goal of making it easier for customers to find the data they need.

HDS, which is a division of the  ¥9.7 trillion ($89 billion) Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, says HCI users will benefit from:

• higher employee productivity through a standard and enterprise search process;
• improved self-service data exploration experience that includes support for detailed queries and ad hoc natural language searches;
• better data management through automated extraction, classification, enrichment and categorization of all data;
• Minimization of inaccessible, dark, or lost data;
• Lower costs by identification infrequently accessed data and movement to lower-cost object storage tier.

HCP supports multi-tenant, cloud-scale deployments.

HDS says the new offering can run on-premise or in the cloud, and supports a scalability “burst” that allows it to expand the number of nodes it occupies in a cluster. End-users benefit from personalized results, while CIOs will appreciate enterprise security features like authentication, document-level control, and granular access policies.

Scott Baker, HDS’ senior director of Emerging Technologies, says the new software will be “invaluable” to customers. “For today’s enterprises, data is the most strategic asset, and connecting the right people to the right data in a timely and meaningful way is critical to staying relevant and competitive.”

Existing HCP customers, such as Rabobank, are anticipating the new capabilities that HCI will bring. “Hitachi Content Intelligence is now an important and necessary part of our global compliance monitoring, discovery, and intervention architecture,” said Walter Hendricks, a business change manager at Rabobank, which has 10 million customers in 47 countries.

Hitachi HCP was tied for second place in Gartner’s recent report, “Critical Capabilities for Object Storage.” IBM CleverSafe’s dsNet was the top ranked object store, while HCP was in a four-way tie with Scality‘s RING, EMC‘s ECS, and Cloudian‘s HyperStore.

With the addition of enterprise search, HDS will now compete with commercial open source search vendors like ElasticSearch and Lucidworks, as well as a number of vendors of proprietary search product.

Other add-ons to HCP include a cloud gateway, file synch, and share capabilities. Hitachi claims HCP is the only object storage system that includes these capabilities as well as enterprise search and analytics. The file system offers an Amazon S3-compatible RESTful API as well as a standard POSIX file system API that looks like NIFS or CIFS. For more info, check out this recent white paper on the product.

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