At the Hitachi Information Forum late last month I expected to see Hitachi announce a big fast box for OLTP applications. It did—the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform – VSP. But beyond all the product messaging that you’d expect from Hitachi, there were three broad messages that were new:

3D Scaling – Scale up, scale deep and scale out

Some messaging around information lifecycle management

The “Content Cloud”

Of the three, the content cloud was the most intriguing, unique and freshest vision in my view. We wanted to learn more and were happy to have Miki Sandorfi, HDS’ Chief Strategist join us in the Cube. You can see Miki talking about Hitachi’s content cloud vision in this short clip:

What is the Content Cloud?

The content cloud is all about how to build a foundational infrastructure and a pool of content that can be leveraged in the future. Today, information goes into a black hole that is typically tied to an application. For example health care records are tied to a health care app. Fifteen years from now how will you find, leverage and use that information? Hitachi’s vision is to free up the data from the app and use virtualization and the content cloud platform to provide data access and portability, independent of the application.

This is not a trivial problem, which is why I like the vision. The explosion in unstructured content and silos of information tied to applications will not be dismantled overnight. The keys to Hitachi’s vision include the notion of intelligence within the platform to be able to find and leverage information down the road.

One huge challenge with this type of approach in my view is the ability to classify data at the point of creation in an automated fashion. Without this capability, which has eluded the industry for years, it will be difficult to scale this type of platform—not from a technology but a business perspective. There will be just too much data. Today Hitachi is using search as a sort of blunt instrument but search is actually only a partial solution.

The Future of the Hitachi Platform

One normally associates Hitachi with very high end transaction performance. The company’s acquisition of Archivas and its partnership with BlueArc place the company squarely in the unstructured data and information management space. I like the idea of a highly scalable, virtualized storage platform to unify unstructured and structured content with the intelligence to manage the information lifecycle in the content cloud. Search, classification, automated policies, and ILM in a single unified, virtualized platform. Content cloud.

No one has one. As Hitachi describes it, why wouldn’t everyone want one?

Where’s your content cloud strategy?