In 1910, Namihei Odaira founded Hitachi to bring technology and innovation to Japan. Today his company does that for the world with conscious attention on improving society and the environment. For Hitachi Data Systems, this means IT innovation and insightful solutions that transform raw data into information. It believes that data drives our world and information is the new currency, says Vivekanand Venugopal, vice-president and general manager, Hitachi Data Systems (India). As enterprises look to cloud service delivery models to reduce costs, increase flexibility and improve their time to market, Hitachi Data Systems promises to move data from existing environments into the cloud without disrupting applications or users, asserts Venugopal in a recent interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary. Edited excerpts:

What is Hitachi Data Systems? cloud strategy and how is it different from competitors?

According to Hitachi Data Systems, cloud is not a technology, but it?s a self-service, on-demand, pay-per-use model. Our agile clouds securely virtualise IT assets into consolidated, easy to manage pools of IT resources that can be provisioned to support a wide range of applications and data types from a single, integrated infrastructure that is secure, reliable, scalable and cost-effective in the face of changing demands.

We provide virtualised cloud ready infrastructure to support any type of information. Next generation virtualisation platform will work on ?Cartesian Scale? principle. The term Cartesian comes from the French philosopher Rene Descartes who wrote a paper ?Discourse on the Method,? where he introduces a way to order objects on paper using two intersecting axes as a measuring guide.

Our virtualised storage framework will scale out, scale up and scale deep. Most of the existing storage virtulisation frame work either scale out or scale up. We are scale deep with external storage virtualisation. This is taking a new approach to deal with customer challenges with file growth, backup, restore and overall costs and solving it through a cloud service delivery model instead of through a traditional IT approach.

What are your offerings in the cloud suite?

The Hitachi cloud service for private file tiering is the first in the Hitachi cloud services suite and will enable customers to move legacy or lower value file data into a cloud storage environment and pay only for what they consume and when they consume it. In partnership with Digi-Data, Hitachi is also offering a public online cloud storage solution that provides a complete services menu for telecom service providers and systems integrators to deliver public cloud storage as a service offerings to consumers.

How did Hitachi Data Systems fare last year?

We performed fairly well. HDS Asia Pacific revenues (excluding Japan domestic sales) for the fourth quarter grew 20% from the fourth quarter fiscal of 2008. We realigned our business model and made significant investments in India, which is one of the fastest growing economies. Earlier we were predominantly in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. Now we have opened offices in Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata and have close to 60 people here.

How will you ensure security of data to customers?

Data security and privacy are the fundamentals for enterprises accessing their information on cloud business model. Hitachi Data Systems cloud infrastructure is based on robust/scalable data security model. We provide multi-tenanted, secure infrastructure to support data privacy. Data is encrypted on disk while in transit for better security. Each action performed by the user on the system is recorded for better post-incident analysis. As part of the infrastructure, multiple copies of the data are stored to avoid data loss due to any factor. Data is replicated across different tiers as well as different datacentre to support disaster recovery and back-up activities.

Any recent customer wins?

Early this year, we acquired Sify as our customer. Sify?s on-demand storage service will help CIOs who are tasked with aligning IT objectives to business needs and will offer customers, a fully managed, utility based, on-demand and scalable storage platform powered by Hitachi Data Systems. We enable an agile cloud infrastructure that empowers customers to look at their existing IT infrastructure in new ways. This approach enables them to provide efficient IT management and increase productivity through automation, meet changing performance, availability and storage needs, ensure security in a shared environment and cost effectively improve data protection.

Where is the Indian market heading in terms of adoption?

Adoption of low cost, cloud-based storage solution will be on the rise, with a utility-based, pay-as-you-grow model, driving revenue growth. Customers need to protect important content on their desktops, laptops and handheld devices by backing it up on vault, which is on the cloud and is accessible via the internet.

To help manage the explosive growth of unstructured data, optimise costs and simplify and automate the unstructured file environment, customers will want a cloud service located within their environment, to eliminate capital expense through pay-per-use model. This will provide them the agility to grow and shrink capacity to meet the ever-changing demands of the business.

We see a huge market in the telecom sector. There will be a huge demand from telecom providers, wireless communication providers, systems integrators, cable and satellite services, internet, online and data services providers, messaging services providers, email and Web service providers and media systems integrators.