HDS brought out the Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) caching appliance a year ago, calling it an “on-ramp to the cloud” for use with its Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) object storage system. Today it added content sharing, file restore and NAS migration capabilities to the appliance.

Content sharing lets customers in remote offices share data across a network of HDI systems, as all of the systems can read from a single HCP namespace. File restore lets users retrieve previous versions of files and deleted files, and the NAS migration lets customers move data from NetApp NAS filers and Windows servers to HDI.

These aren’t the first changes HDS has made to HDI since it hit the market. Earlier this year HDS added a virtual appliance and a single node version (the original HDI was only available in clusters) for customers not interested in high availability.

None of these changes are revolutionary, but HDS cloud product marketing manager Tanya Loughlin said the idea is to add features that match the customers’ stages of cloud readiness.

“We have customers bursting at the seams with data, trying to manage all this stuff,” she said. “There is a lot of interest in modernizing the way they deliver IT, whether it’s deployed in a straight definition of a cloud with a consumption-based model or deployed in-house. Customers want to make sure what they buy today is cloud-ready. We’re bringing this to market as a cloud-at-your-own-pace.”