Hitachi Vantara has partnered with Telefonica and Santander Bank in developing the first 5G use cases for the banking sector in Europe. They have developed the first 5G experience around three use cases that customers can enjoy at two bank offices in the city of Alcobendas, near Madrid, the first banking offices connected by 5G technology in Europe.
One of the use cases is 5G storage, a low latency cloud storage solution provided by Telefónica and based on the Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere Edge solution embedded on Telefónica's edge computing infrastructure. The HCP Anywhere edge is software that can reside on an appliance or a virtual machine and provides a “bottomless” filer. As files are ingested, they are replicated to an HCP repository in the cloud, so backup is not required. As the local storage fills up the older files are stubbed out so that they are still accessible but don’t take up local storage space. If the edge device is destroyed, it can be restarted immediately creating new files and accessing existing files in the cloud.
This enables the bank to provide a “mobile office” to allow banks to provide the same services that they offer in the traditional offices with fixed communications, on a temporary basis. Mobile offices can be deployed at big events (sports, concerts, festivals, fairs…) or for emergencies. The technology will allow a low-latency cloud to deploy critical services in offices without the need to change existing equipment or having a global 5G backup system that preserves the same features and services that are available with the fixed network. The HCP Anywhere Edge device is stateless, so it can be shut down on an appliance in one location, then started up on another appliance in another location as long as there is a connection to the HCP repository in the cloud. HCP and HCP Anywhere meet all the stringent security, privacy, and availability requirements of the banking industry.
HCP and HCP Anywhere are the ideal solution for 5G storage.