Somers, New York; Tokyo; and Santa Clara, California, June 6, 2001 — IBM, Hitachi, Ltd., and its wholly owned subsidiary, Hitachi Data Systems, today announced a strategic technology agreement that will extend interoperability between the companies' storage servers and allow customers to more easily deploy open storage networks.

Specifically, IBM has licensed the storage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for its Shark Enterprise Storage Server to Hitachi. As a result, Hitachi will be able to continue to maintain compatibility with IBM's Peer to Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) and Extended Remote Copy (XRC) functions, and will now be able to support such functions as FlashCopy, Multiple Allegiance, and Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) on its enterprise storage system marketed globally by Hitachi Data Systems as the Hitachi Freedom Storage™ Lightning 9900™ Series.

In return, Hitachi has licensed APIs for the Lightning 9900 to IBM. IBM will now be able to support such functions as Hitachi's NanoCopy™ and ShadowImage on its Shark server.

John McArthur, Vice President of Storage Research at IDC commented, "This is a winning combination for IBM, Hitachi and their customers. Customers now have a choice of products and a choice of suppliers while maintaining a common set of data availability, data replication, and performance tools."

APIs are the programming code or instructions for how to access and share data between storage servers and devices. By providing access to their respective APIs, Hitachi and IBM expect to enable their storage products to work seamlessly in a storage network, providing customers greater freedom to choose what is best suited for their individual applications.

"IBM and Hitachi are leaders in driving toward open standards and interoperability in the industry," said Walter Raizner, general manager, products, for IBM's Storage Systems Group. "This agreement is a major step for customers and the storage industry, who can now have greater confidence in the compatibility of solutions using IBM's innovative advanced functions in networks employing Hitachi products."

"The agreement announced today is good news for customers of both our companies, especially those who storage is attached to S/390 processors," said Claus Mikkelsen, director of storage applications for Hitachi Data Systems. "Hitachi and IBM have provided a concrete example of how companies can cooperate effectively to assure the interoperability of their products. We are particularly pleased that IBM customers will now be able to make use of Hitachi's innovative NanoCopy function and that Hitachi customers will be able to access IBM's PAV and Multiple Allegiance functions."

IBM's PPRC and XRC services are data copy functions especially useful in disaster recovery solutions. FlashCopy provides point-in-time replication of data. PAV and Multiple Allegiance functions boost the performance of data servers and mainframe computers.

Hitachi's NanoCopy, used in conjunction with its Asynchronous Remote Copy function, replicates data between any number of primary systems and any number of secondary systems anywhere in the world, providing a completely non-disruptive point-in-time copy solution as well as a solution for disaster recovery. ShadowImage is a non-disruptive means of making multiple point-in-time copies within a single storage system.

Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 2000 (ended March 31, 2001) consolidated sales of 8,417 billion yen ($67.9 billion) The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd., please visit Hitachi's Web site at www.global.hitachi.com

¹ At an exchange rate of 124 yen to the dollar.

Contacts: PR

Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. Nanocopy, ShadowImage, Freedom Storage and Lightning 9900 are trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems. S/390 is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited Windows NT and Windows 2000 are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.