Well thought-out strategies and better pricing are what Hitachi is capitalizing on to reach their goal of becoming the cloud content king. The company is planning on putting up a refined content storage cloud infrastructure that will fuse the power of Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) with the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS).  This concept will align with the organization’s current tactic to concentrate on data center upgrading via virtualization tiering, migration and dynamic provisioning.

Another arm of Hitachi, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), recently teamed up with Microsoft to deliver new converged cloud systems. The combined HDS-Microsoft data center products include two cloud-enabling compute engines: Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and Hitachi Compute Blade 320, converged platform for Microsoft Exchange 2010 and cloud systems built on Microsoft hyper-V cloud fast track.

In an interview with Chief Strategist for File and Content Services at HDS, Miki Sandorfi briefly discussed the purpose of company joining the converged data center systems crowd saying, “Because we are integrating our storage with new compute blades and network infrastructure components, we are now providing repeatable, converged architectures for the data center, as customers move down the path toward cloud.”

An Asian home-grown enterprise, Hitachi also marked some developments within the region. It recently partnered with VMware vSphere and VMware vFabric cloud application platform to assist financial institutions in various parts of the continent. The company has also been a frequent collaborator of VMware. It was early this year when Hitachi added VAAI (VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration) support on their Virtual Storage Platform.

With hunt for the ideal cloud storage solution still on, several organizations have been keen on taking up the challenge, keeping their products on par with the competition. Hewlett-Packard, during last week’s HP Discover event, clears the stage for the launch of their version of Infrastructure 2.0 through converged storage sets. This concept was applauded by top storage analyst, David Floyer. This Infrastructure 2.0 that will be the driving force in cloud storage trends in the next five to ten years is the same target of Hitachi with their next-gen storage.

Cost efficient archiving storage solutions, long term preservation, availability and retention of content will be Hitachi’s focal points as they dwell in the odd game of cloud storage solutions and content.