Hitachi Heads for the Archives

Hitachi Data Systems plans a March foray into the archiving game with a fixed content system that will compete with EMC Centera and others, according to industry sources.

Hitachi has been mum on details of the system, but it likely consists of an existing hardware platform and software from an OEM deal. Startup Archivas is considered a prime candidate to supply the software. (See Archivas Seeks Archiving Action.)

We believe HDS has plans to release a product similar to EMC’s Centera that targets the high-growth fixed content market in the March/April timeframe,” analyst Kaushik Roy of Susquehanna Financial Group wrote in a note to clients this week.

Another source pegs the Hitachi release to the CeBit tradeshow March 9 in Germany, and identifies it as “a combination of Hitachi hardware and Archivas software.” Another Wall Street analyst says the archiving system is definitely in the works for March, but was less certain about an Archivas tie-in.

Hitachi isn’t making any public pronouncements, citing “HDS policy not to comment on industry rumor or speculation.” Archivas did not return a call for comment.But Archivas has been clear that its strategy is to forge OEM deals with major storage vendors, and there aren’t many left that have yet to launch a competing product. Archivas sells its clustered archiving software on industry standard hardware, which makes it easy to partner.

HDS has been the most glaring absence from the archiving market, first pursued by EMC with its Centera in 2002. (See EMC Preps Centera.) Centera was followed by the Hewlett-Packard Reference Information Storage System (RISS), the IBM DRR50, Network Appliance's NearStore, and Sun IntelliStore as well as offerings from private companies Archivas, Nexsan, and Permabit.

EMC calls the technology content-addressable storage (CAS), and while some competitors don’t use that acronym, they all want part of the growing fixed content market. Fixed content consists of documents that don’t change once they are stored, and compliance regulations have greatly increased for long term storage of such data.

In parallel, Hitachi is part of a new Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) initiative to develop a standard called eXtensible-Access Method Interface (XAM-I) for moving reference data between storage devices, a common use for CAS systems. In a blog on Hitachi’s web site, CTO Hu Yoshida cites the importance of the initiative from “a consortium of industry vendors as a basis for the development of a fixed-content access method for content-addressable storage.”

Last week, Yoshida told Byte and Switch that Hitachi fought an attempt by EMC to call the standard XAM-API. The group settled on XAM-I, which includes other interfaces besides API.While EMC and others require applications to use an API to read and write to their systems natively, Archivas supports NFS, CIFS, and HTTP protocols without an API. EMC supports those protocols through a gateway for applications that don't use its API, but several features of the system are lost when the gateway approach is used.

“EMC’s taken an API approach,” Yoshida says. “If you take a protocol approach, it’s much easier to implement.”

That doesn’t sound like a man who will be on the fixed storage sidelines for long.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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