Essentials on Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) Data Protection and Security

HCP is the heir to the line of solutions of Archivas, a publisher bought by the Japanese manufacturer in 2007. The platform of Hitachi is actually made up of several components including HCP which is the heart of the platform of Object Storage , HCP Anywhere, which provides advanced file sharing and synchronization services over HCP and Hitachi Data Ingestor an appliance that allows businesses to ingest data into HCP via traditional NAS protocols .

Data provides the essential information that organizations need to make decisions, drive innovation, and grow. In today’s business environment, data growth and security are real concerns. The growth of big data has exposed the bottlenecks and failures of traditional storage methods, especially with unstructured data. Traditional RAID storage schemes are based on parity, and if more than two drives fail simultaneously, data becomes unrecoverable. Object storage addresses these challenges.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), one of our storage partners and a recognized leader by IDC in the object storage space, delivers the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) that extends the flexibility, security, and breadth of object storage while delivering the economies of a public cloud computing platform with the benefits of a private cloud.

HCP delivers a range of data protection must-haves while being a completely back-up free platform, coordinating the protection of data integrity, privacy, and availability.

Data Protection

HCP data protection is built in to the object store for retention, replication, and self-healing. Here’s what Hitachi has to say on data protection essentials that HCP delivers:

Proven RAID-6 protection
Erasure coding of commodity storage
Both RAID and erasure coding
Automatic technology refresh
Configurable data redundancy
Metadata protection levels
Content validation
Perfect the replicas
Object versioning protection
Content Security

HCP also delivers the data and content security needs that enterprises require with today’s strict regulations, including:

Retention
Data destruction
Authenticity
Access control and auditing
Discovery
Encryption
By design, any object store protects every piece of data placed on it.  No other backup or copy of the data needs to occur.  This, along with the many features of HCP, give IT departments the data storage security of a private cloud offering with the convenience of public cloud offerings.

In fact, the world’s largest public cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud— use object storage as the primary platform in their datacenters. Next to tape, it’s the least expensive storage technology. And since it’s based on REST protocol, it’s also the simplest to manage.

For these reasons, internal IT departments are taking notice and actively adopting object storage technology. Hitachi is well positioned to take advantage of this trend.

HCP has evolved a lot in recent years. The latest evolution of the platform is based on a distributed storage architecture based on standard x86 nodes (HCP S10 nodes) and makes use of erasure code techniques to ensure data security. It is possible via HCP to drive multiple S10 clusters (with a maximum unit capacity of 18 Po) to provide exascale class capabilities.

Note that HCP also knows how to consume the storage capacity of traditional bays for its own needs via the HCP 500 nodes.

One of the strengths of HCP is the robustness of its multitenant capabilities, replication and geo-replication capabilities, and WORM mode support for archiving applications. HCP has its own API and also supports the S3 and Swift APIs .

The S3 support serves as a basic addition to integration between HCP and Hadoop . Hitachi does not currently support native SAN or NAS access over HCP. On the other hand, the HDI gateways (Hitachi Data Ingestor) of the manufacturer allow access via NAS protocols to the data contained in HCP.

Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) is part of the Magic Quadrant for object storage and clustered file system actors seen by Gartner (Gartner source, October 2016) where it is cataloged as a "challenger".