HDS Goes Sky-High: New Private And Public Storage Clouds

HDS this week debuted a suite of products and services under which it will deploy and manage a private cloud infrastructure at the customer site and charge on a pay-as-needed basis, said Linda Xu, director of worldwide product marketing, file, content and cloud services at HDS.

The company also unveiled a partnership with SaaS provider Digi-Data to provide a public storage cloud infrastructure that telcos, service providers and systems integrators can deliver to their customers, Xu said.

HDS is following up on previous changes in its approach to the storage industry, including its unveiling in April of plans to release a unified compute platform including integrated storage, server and networking technology, Xu said.

"Now we are wrapping our services around our platform to offer a solution such as storage-as-a-service," she said.

HDS' new Hitachi Cloud Service for Private Tiering integrates its hardware, software and services along with software from storage vendor CommVault into a private cloud solution that sits in a customer data center to provide storage on a pay-per-use model.

HDS owns and manages the equipment, with customers paying only for the data that is migrated to the private cloud, Xu said. For instance, customers could automatically migrate data older than 90 days to free up space in their more high-performance storage devices, she said.

"We are taking a pragmatic approach to the cloud," she said. "We are helping customers evolve into the cloud by providing a purely consumption-based model, with no risk at all to customers."

The private storage cloud is expected to be available within the next couple of months, with pricing to be unveiled at that time. It initially will be available direct to customers, but HDS plans to unveil an indirect channel program around the services at that time.

The company's public storage cloud offering combines HDS storage hardware and software along with Digi-Data's management layer in a package that can be used by telcos and other large service providers to offer storage-as-a-service to their customers, Xu said.

Those service providers can then offer multiple types of storage services to customers via a single sign-on and single billing system, she said.