Features - Storage Innovations:

HDS LAUNCHES SATA INTERMIX OPTION FOR THUNDER 9500 V SERIES

Hitachi Data Systems Corp, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd, announced that the company is extending its Application Optimized Storage solutions, with the launch of a new Serial ATA (SATA) Intermix Option for its Thunder 9500 V Series of modular storage systems. This new option, which can be added to existing Thunder 9500 V systems, creates the world's first "in a box" high speed Fibre Channel and lower cost native SATA tiered storage capability.

"Buyers of enterprise storage today want data from different applications to be routed to the most appropriate storage devices based on availability, performance, capacity, and cost criteria," said Scott Genereux, vice president of global marketing and business development at Hitachi Data Systems. "Hitachi Data Systems' Application Optimized Storage provides solutions tailored to specific applications that are underpinned by a common software platform and the industry's broadest range of disk storage systems."

The new Thunder SATA Intermix Option, offering up to 107TB in a single storage system, is targeted at the increasing number of fixed content applications, where the need for data integrity and availability is high but access requirements are much less frequent than with operational data. Fixed content applications include e-mail archiving, database archiving, digital archiving by broadcasters or medical systems and disk backup.

"New global regulatory requirements are driving customer demand for storage solutions that simplify the management and migration of data throughout the entire data lifecycle," said Brenda Zawatski, vice president of product marketing of VERITAS Software. "VERITAS' market-leading data protection solutions, VERITAS NetBackup software and VERITAS Data Lifecycle Manager, enable customers to categorize, index and migrate data automatically to tiered storage, including the low-cost SATA drives and high performance Fibre Channel drives found within Hitachi Data Systems' Thunder 9500 V Series."

Many ATA-based solutions on the market today are only suitable for desktop applications, and not appropriate for enterprise storage. However, there is a demand for appropriately adapted solutions for low-access applications, such as archiving. Compliance legislation has also raised the reliability threshold for certain archive applications to the same level as operational data. Unlike alternative solutions, Hitachi has enhanced SATA reliability and performance, through controller improvements, to offer enterprise-class data integrity and protection in a cost-effective storage solution.

"Yet again, by leveraging Hitachi's deep research and development excellence, Hitachi Data Systems' combined technology is delivering another industry first," said Shinjiro Iwata, CEO of Hitachi Data Systems. "By providing a Fibre Channel and SATA Intermix, within a single storage system, HDS is extending its Application Optimized Storage solutions to cater directly to fixed content applications."

To further meet regulatory compliance requirements, Hitachi Data Systems' Open LDEV Guard data retention utility provides a disk-based WORM capability, allowing customers in both open systems and mainframe environments to lock down archived data on HDS storage systems, making it non-erasable and nonrewritable for prescribed periods.

"Today's IT managers are sophisticated," said John McArthur, group vice president of storage research at IDC. "Rather than pursuing a single-solution storage architecture, they want a variety of solutions with price points and performance attributes appropriate to the various applications and jobs. However, they also want to manage these solutions using common management tools. Hitachi Data Systems has met these requirements with its Application Optimized Storage initiative. And with the SATA Intermix Option, the company has correctly identified that in support of data retention for compliance initiatives, while the performance requirements may be lower, the data integrity bar must be on par with storage for online transaction databases."

"Taken in total, these announcements create a new class of storage arrays -- ones that can apply enterprise-class performance, reliability and data protection capabilities to arrays that can service both primary and secondary ("nearline") storage applications including backup/restore and archive of unstructured and regulatory compliance-related data," said John Webster, senior analyst and founder of Data Mobility Group.

Application Optimized Storage Solutions

Hitachi Data Systems' Application Optimized Storage solutions are built on a common management and software platform providing customers with a businesscentric view from the application to the storage device. Application Optimized Storage solutions combine HiCommand business and application modules with the legendary high performance/high availability Hitachi storage systems. This combination enables customers to precisely match business application requirements to Hitachi storage system attributes (performance, availability, and data value), leveraging the application-centric management capabilities of the HiCommand Storage Area Management Suite.

About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems leverages global R&D resources to develop storage solutions built on technology with the performance, availability and scalability to maximize customers' ROI and minimize their risk. By focusing on the customer's perspective as we apply the best hardware, software, and services from Hitachi and our partners, we uniquely satisfy our customers' business needs.

With 2,800 employees, Hitachi Data Systems conducts business through direct and indirect channels in the public, government and private sectors in over 170 countries. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.

About Hitachi Ltd

Hitachi Ltd, headquartered in Tokyo, is a global electronics company with approximately 326,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2003 (ended March 31) consolidated sales totaled 8,632.4 billion yen ($81.4 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors, including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's Web site at www.hitachi.com.