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HDS Lights Way For Advanced Content Archiving

Fresh off of its biggest platform refresh in more than two years, Hitachi Data Systems today said it has significantly upgraded the digital archiving appliance it co-created with Archivas, adding diskless storage, de-duplication and new security features. HCAP version 2.0 provides an archive tier of storage where aged data on primary storage can be stored […]

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Clint Boulton

May 29, 2007

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Fresh off of its biggest platform refresh in more than two years, Hitachi
Data Systems today said it has significantly upgraded the
digital archiving appliance it co-created with
Archivas, adding diskless storage, de-duplication and new security
features.

HCAP version 2.0 provides an archive tier of storage where aged data on
primary storage can be stored for specific periods of time to meet corporate
and federal record-retention regulations.

The product competes with EMC’s (Quote) Centera and IBM’s
(Quote)nbsp;DDR 550 machines in the race to command the market for
preserving unstructured data, such as files, images and Web content.

Actually, Asim Zaheer, senior director of business development for content
archiving at HDS, said HCAP V 2.0 will outperform those machines, thanks to
enhancements to the box’s scalability, capacity and speed.

For example, HCAP V 2.0 holds up to 20 petabytes (define) in
an 80-node archive system, supporting as many as 32 billion objects.
Moreover, Zaheer said performance can be up to 500 percent greater than the first
HCAP platform and the competing products from EMC and IBM.

HCAP for the archive.

Source: HDS

HCAP V 2.0 comes in two versions: as an integrated appliance with HDS’
WMS100 storage array or as a diskless version (HCAP-DL) in which the
storage has been disaggregated from the server to let customers choose from
among all of HDS’ major storage systems, including WMS100, AMS200/500/1000,
USP V, or NSC55 systems, to match the right performance.

The diskless version of HCAP V 2.0 reduces the number of server nodes
required, which means less heat emission and power consumption. Zaheer said
this is a major departure from rival systems, whose archive systems include
a server with storage embedded in the server.

To safeguard customers’ data, HDS is also introducing new encryption that
allows a customer to store their security keys in the HCAP V 2.0 and
“secretly share” that key across multiple nodes within the archive. So,
rather than store the whole key in one of the devices, it’s distributed in
pieces across all of the nodes within the archive.

This means a user would need all of the nodes, or devices, within a computer
system to decrypt the content. So, Zaheer said, if a server or storage
device is stolen from the cluster, the device would be unreadable by any
other device. Most digital archive systems use key management as layered
applications that sit unprotected outside the system, he added.

Moreover, HCAP V 2.0 now employs full object replication (file, metadata and
policies), using digital signatures to ensure authenticity, along with data
compression for saving bandwidth and encryption of data at rest.

Another new perk for HCAP V 2.0 is the addition of data de-duplication,
which eliminates redundant data because only a unique instance of the data
is retained on a disk or tape.

To do this, HCAP V 2.0 provides both a hash comparison and binary comparison
to ensure objects are duplicates. This avoids so-called “hash collisions,”
where different objects could have the same cryptographic hash key.
Customers will be able to see how many duplicates were eliminated and the
amount of total storage capacity saved.

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