Features - Storage Innovations:

HITACHI, HP OFFER 300GB DRIVES FOR SERVER, STORAGE SOLUTIONS

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) and HP announced availability of the industry's first storage and server solutions offering high-performance 300GB Fibre Channel and SCSI disk drive capacity. HP will offer the Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 Fibre Channel drive in the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) and the Ultrastar 10K300 SCSI drive in industry-standard HP ProLiant servers and the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family. The Ultrastar 10K300 offers a valuable combination of capacity, reliability and ease of integration.

"HP and Hitachi share an innovative spirit and customer-focused approach to doing business that underpins our ongoing relationship and enables us to deliver these types of breakthrough product offerings," said Fumio Kugiya, general manager of the Server Business Unit for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "Hitachi is pleased to be supporting HP in this effort, and we look forward to continuing to deliver best-in-class products to our shared customers."

With the new 300GB Fibre Channel drives, HP doubles the high-performance data storage capability of the midrange StorageWorks EVA to a raw capacity of 70TB. With the massively expanded capacity of the HP StorageWorks EVA family, customers can continue to benefit from the system's ease-of-management as more information is digitized and retained.

"We are pleased that our close work with Hitachi has resulted in HP being first-to-market with a range of solutions that address our customers' storage and server requirements," said Kyle Fitze, director of marketing, Online Storage Division, Network Storage Solutions at HP. "HP selected Hitachi because of their reputation for quality and astounding storage capacity, both of which are key design attributes for our storage and servers."

The Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 is built on a proven drive design with demonstrated enterprise class reliability and product quality. The new 3.5-inch drives satisfy the requirements of mission-critical storage applications such as online transaction processing, data analysis and media streaming. The Ultrastar 10K300 features capacities of 73, 147 and 300GB and a 10,000 RPM rotational speed.

HP Storage Arrays

Featuring unique virtualization and automation capabilities, the HP StorageWorks EVA family of products is simple to manage yet doesn't compromise performance. In fact, it is currently the Storage Performance Council SPC-1 dual-controller performance leader. When configured with the new Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300, users should be able to more than double their high-performance storage capacity using the same amount of floor space, while lowering their cost per megabyte.

The EVA family is designed for environments where there is a need for improved storage utilization and scalability, consistently high transaction input/output and megabyte data rate performance, seamless capacity expansion, instantaneous replication and simplified storage administration.

About Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a result of the strategic combination of Hitachi's and IBM's storage technology businesses. By the end of 2003, Hitachi GST became the industry's second largest hard disk drive manufacturer with $4.2 billion in revenue.

The company's goal is to enable users to fully engage in the digital lifestyle by providing access to large amounts of storage capacity in formats suitable for the office, on the road and in the home. The company offers customers worldwide a comprehensive range of storage products for desktop computers, high-performance servers and mobile devices. For more information on Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, please visit the company's Web site at www.hitachigst.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.