Hitachi offers three-tier strategy for enterprise cloud deployments

Hitachi Data Systems has unveiled a cloud strategy designed to help enterprise customers move to a cloud-based IT environment, using a three-tier model that builds on firms' existing infrastructures.

Announced today, Hitachi's new cloud services are divided into an infrastructure cloud, consisting of the hardware and virtualisation layer, a content cloud focused on storage and separating applications from their data, and an information cloud to handle big data issues.

The infrastructure cloud is essentially a private cloud that Hitachi can build for a customer, based on the existing datacentre hardware they own, while the other two are applications that build on this to meet specific requirements.

Hitachi explained that a major part of its strategy is protecting a customer's investments by building on the traditional infrastructure they already have, and that the three-tier strategy is intended to let them build at a pace they are happy with.

"Customers don't want to leap from what they have straight to the end goal," Bob Plumridge, European chief technology officer for Hitachi Data Systems, told V3.

"This is an effort to help them move from one state to the next at the pace they want to go and reuse what they've already got."

Plumridge explained that Hitachi can take a customer's existing servers, storage and networks and consolidate them into a private cloud on their own premises, supplementing where necessary with its own equipment.

"We can deliver a complete stack with storage and blade server hardware, and we're happy to work with any networking partner the customer currently has," he said.

Hitachi is also hypervisor agnostic, according to Plumridge, and can build a cloud based on any of the major stacks.

"VMware are dominant at the moment, but were seeing increasing take-up from Hyper-V, and growing interest from customers in KVM," he said.

A cloud management portal is also included, providing customers with a self-service interface, and the service can be delivered directly by Hitachi, or via one of its channel partners.