Computerworld

HDS big-data tools should help IT, mobile health workers

Hitachi Data Systems is applying analytics where data has been siloed

Hitachi Data Systems is aiming its big-data expertise at health care and enterprise IT departments with specialized products for combining types of information.

The company has been expanding beyond its traditional storage business through development and acquisitions in big data in recent years. It bought Avrio and Pantascene last year for public safety video and sensor systems, and this year it has announced acquisitions of SAP services specialist Oxya and business analytics vendor Pentaho.

HDS wants to help organizations in specific realms put together data they've never combined before to gain new insights and share knowledge with more participants. It's already introduced products for health, public safety and telecommunications network analytics.

On Tuesday at Hitachi Connect in Las Vegas, HDS announced a system for analyzing data about enterprise IT operations and updated its health-care analytics platform with mobile access.

Hitachi Live Insight for IT Operations is a software-and-service solution for combining all the machine-to-machine data from an enterprise data center so the IT department can maintain high availability. The product can analyze information from applications, storage systems, power supplies, temperature sensors and other components to determine the root cause of a problem that may affect multiple systems.

Live Insight is focused on HDS's own products but can collect and analyze data from multiple vendors' systems using standard IT reporting formats such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), said Bob Madaio, senior director of product marketing. Software from Sumo Logic compiles the diverse sets of data, and a cloud-based Hitachi service performs the analytics.

The system is designed to find the causes of slowdowns and other problems that are less than catastrophic, as well as analyzing failures that take down applications and systems.

Also on Tuesday, HDS introduced the latest version of its Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) for Connected Health, which for the first time lets users view its data on mobile devices.

HCR, introduced in 2012, aggregates information from health-care systems, such as MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging machines) that come from different vendors and use different data formats. The data from those systems used to reside in silos, and HCR puts it in one virtual platform spanning multiple caregivers, where all the information is searchable and discoverable through the same interface.

Starting with the new release, users will be able to access HCR from Android and iOS phones and tablets. To secure sensitive health data and help users comply with regulations, all HCR data can be wiped from the mobile device as soon as it's turned off, HDS said.

Both products will be available by the end of June, HDS said.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com