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At Hitachi NEXT 2019 Conference, last month, there was a lot of talk about new data services from Hitachi. Keith and I thought it would be a good time to sit down and talk with Scott Baker (@Kraken-Scuba), Director of Content and Data Intelligence, at Hitachi Vantara about what’s going on with data operations these days and how customers are shedding more light on their data.
Information supply chain
Something Scott said in his opening remarks caught my attention when he mentioned customer information supply chains. The information supply chain is similar to manufacturing supply chains, but it’s all about data. Just like manufacturing supply chains where parts and services come from anywhere and are used to create products/services for customers,
information supply chains are about the data used in their organization operations. Information supply chain data is A) being sourced from many places (or applications); B) being added to by supply chain processing (or other applications); and C) ultimately used by the organization to supply a product/service to customers.
But after the product/service is supplied the similarity between manufacturing and information supply chains breaks down. With the information supply chain, data is effectively indestructible, is infinitely re-useable and can live forever. Who throws data away anymore?
The problem most organizations have with information supply chains is once the product/service is supplied, data is often put away never to be seen again or as Scott puts it, goes dark.
This is where Hitachi Content intelligence (HCI) comes in. HCI is designed to take (unstructured or structured) data and analyze it (using natural language and other processing tools) to surround it with information and other metadata, so that it can become more visible and useful to the organization for the life of its existence.
Customers can also use HCI to extract and blend data streams together, automating the creation of an information rich, data repository. The data repository can readily be searched to re-discover or uncover attributes about the data not visible before.
Scott also mentioned the Hitachi Pentaho Platform which can be used to make real time decision from structured data. Pentaho information can also be fed into HCI to provide more intelligence for your structured data.
But HCI can also be used to analyze other database data as well. For instance, database blob and text elements can be fed to and analyzed by HCI. HCI analysis can include natural language processing and other functionality to tag the data by adding key:value information, all of which can be supplied back to the database or Pentaho to add further value to structured data.
Customers can also use HCI to read and transform database tables into XML files. XML files can be stored in object stores as objects or in file systems. XML data could easily be textually indexed and be searched by various tools to better understand the structured data information
We also talked about Hadoop data that can be offloaded to Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) object storage with a stub left behind. Once data is in HCP, HCI can be triggered to index and add more metadata, which can then later be used to decide when to move data back to Hadoop for further analysis.
Finally, Keith mentioned that he just got back from KubeCon and there was an increasing cry for data being used with containerized applications. Scott mentioned HCP for Cloud Scale, the newest member of the HCP object store family, focused on scale out capabilities to provide highly consistent, object storage performance for customers that need it. Customers running containerized workloads use scale-out capabilities to respond to user demand and now they have on premises object storage that can scale with them, as needs change.
The podcast ran ~24 minutes. Scott was very knowledgeable about data workflows, pipelines and the need for better discovery tools. We had a great time discussing information supply chains and how Hitachi can help customers optimize their data pipelines. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Scott Baker, Director of Content and Data Intelligence at Hitachi Vantara
Scott Baker is, and has been, an active member of the information technology, data analytics, data management, and data protection disciplines for longer than he is willing to admit.
In his present role at Hitachi, Scott is the Senior Director of the Content and Data Intelligence organization focused on Hitachi’s Digital Transformation, Data Management, Data Governance, Data Mobility, Data Protection and Data Analytics solutions which includes Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), HCP Anywhere, HCP Gateway, Hitachi Content Intelligence, and Hitachi Data Protection Solutions.
Scott is a VMware Certified Professional, recognized as a subject matter expert, industry speaker, and author. Scott has been a panelist on topics related to storage, cloud, information governance, data security, infrastructure standardization, and social media topics. His educational background includes an MBA, Master’s & Bachelor’s in Computer Science.
When he’s not working, Scott is an avid scuba diver, underwater photographer, and PADI Scuba Instructor. He has a passion for public speaking, whiteboarding, teaching, and traveling the world.