HP, EMC, Hitachi, Sun Microsystems, Symantec to Expand Industry Standard for Storage Management

Business Wire, June 22, 2006

"Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems have demonstrated continuous leadership in the movement towards open standards management frameworks," said Jack Domme, senior vice president of Global Solutions, Strategy and Development at Hitachi Data Systems. "As a founding member of the SMI-S initiative, we have contributed to the development of the SMI-S specifications of standards for heterogeneous storage management and successfully completed SMI-S Conformance Testing for all Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems products. Since its inception, Hitachi's HiCommand Suite has been architected utilizing open standards frameworks such as CIM and SMI-S, which have allowed us to provide our customers with the same common set of storage management and replication tools across all lines of our TagmaStore storage systems. Hitachi has always maintained an open and collaborative business strategy and the creation of a reference platform based on recognized standards like SMI-S or Web services will help to further this cause by easing the deployment and management of heterogeneous storage environments for customers."

"Storage management is a pressing priority for customers and it's time for the industry to get serious about developing a common, standards-based framework to address it. The SNIA provides the most conducive environment for enabling the success of standards-based software development projects and it's why Sun has aggressively lobbied for changes to the SNIA's core governance model over the last eight months," said Adam Mendoza, director of storage industry initiatives at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Building on existing industry standards like SMI-S in a collaborative, cooperative environment is the most logical path to helping customers solve their storage management challenges. To jumpstart the process, Sun will contribute CIM provider code to the initiative."

"SMI-S is now a backbone for the storage industry and a vital technology for bringing customers new value in our solutions. Augmenting SMI-S to provide more advanced automation, disaster resilience, and security represents a key future deliverable for the storage industry," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president for Symantec's Storage Foundation Group.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization made up of more than 460 member companies and close to 7,000 active individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA members share the common goal of advancing the adoption of storage networks as complete and trusted solutions. More information is available at www.snia.org.

More information about EMC Corp. (NYSE:EMC) is available at www.emc.com.

More information about Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), is available at www.hds.com.

More information about Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW) is available at www.sun.com.

More information about Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq:SYMC) is available at www.symantec.com.

More information about HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.