Hitachi Data Systems Brings Radical Efficiency to Enterprise Storage with Virtualization to 32 PetaBytes

Business Wire, Sept 7, 2004

NEW YORK -- Hitachi Data Systems Corporation

Revolutionary Hitachi TagmaStore(TM) Universal Storage Platform
                   Redefines TCO and Business Value

    Virtualization and Universal Replication Breakthroughs Enable a
          New Paradigm for Storage Deployment and Management

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today announced its new Hitachi TagmaStore(TM) Universal Storage Platform, a combination of revolutionary advances in hardware and software that radically improves storage efficiency and significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of enterprise storage. The platform, which extends Hitachi's leadership in performance and capacity, powers virtualization breakthroughs, including logical partitioning, management of externally attached heterogeneous storage, and universal storage-agnostic replication. Hitachi Data Systems will provide professional and consulting services through its Global Solution Services organization to help customers obtain the highest benefits from the Universal Storage Platform.

"The Universal Storage Platform represents a new category in the industry as its powerful architecture enables new levels of virtualization and replication not possible in previous generations of enterprise storage. It supports a new operational paradigm capable of delivering a holistic Application Optimized Storage(TM) approach across an entire enterprise," said Scott Genereux, senior vice president of global marketing and channels, Hitachi Data Systems. "The result is a new economics framework for information infrastructures, providing organizations with millions of dollars in potential cost savings."

Radical Efficiency(TM)

A recent SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) survey of customer pain points ranked "Total Cost of Ownership" number one. According to ITCentrix, an independent software and services firm, customers can expect the Universal Storage Platform to deliver significant TCO benefits.

"It's currently too expensive to provide a common management solution for the fragmented data assets of a corporation," said Dave Vellante, CEO of ITCentrix. "Based on our extensive analysis, nothing else compares to this product, which in some configurations will deliver a 160 plus percent internal rate of return on a $3.4M investment over 3 years. This changes the dynamics of the storage industry."

These savings are achieved through the Universal Storage Platform's ability to aggregate up to 32 Petabytes of internal and external storage into a single virtual storage pool, with common functionality and application Quality of Service (QOS), managed from a single console. This new platform dramatically reduces management overhead and software licensing costs, at the same time extending the latest software advances to older or depreciating storage assets.

By adopting this unified management structure, Hitachi removes the need for, and cost of, multiple and overlapping software products. For example, within a conventional SAN each storage device requires independent replication software. In contrast, Universal Replicator software resides on the Universal Storage Platform only, eliminating the need for multiple software licenses, upgrades and maintenance contracts, further reducing the total cost of ownership.

Breakthrough Innovations

Several breakthrough innovations from Hitachi, Ltd. implemented in the Universal Storage Platform and accompanying software enable these significant economic and information architecture benefits:

--Hitachi Universal Star Network(TM) - The third-generation of Hitachi's unique massively parallel, mega scalable crossbar switch architecture delivers an unsurpassed 68 Gigabytes per second of cached bandwidth, 2 Million IOPs (input output operations per second), 256 concurrent memory operations, and supports 332TB of internal storage capacity--representing advantages over other storage products of 850%, 500%, 800%, and 395%, respectively.

--Hitachi Universal Volume Manager software - Hitachi extends its Virtual Storage Ports/Host Storage Domains technology into the first large-scale embedded virtualization layer, enabling up to 32 Petabytes of internal and external storage to be aggregated into one common pool and managed by a single set of tools and software. Combined with Volume Migration, Universal Volume Manager enables policy-based data lifecycle management across multiple tiers of storage.

--Hitachi Virtual Partition Manager software - The first storage implementation of the logical partitioning feature from Hitachi, Ltd.'s large-scale servers, the Virtual Partition Manager allocates internal and external physical storage resources, including ports, cache and disk, into independently-managed Private Virtual Storage Machines. Partitions can be dynamically modified to meet application Quality of Service requirements based on changing business priorities.

--Hitachi Universal Replicator software - Continuing to advance Hitachi's superior asynchronous remote replication technology, the Universal Replicator features several industry firsts, including heterogeneous replication, disk-based journaling, protection against link failure, "pull" copying, and multi-data center support, greatly simplifying disaster recovery solutions for customers.