Outlines Vision and Strategy for Open Information Management
NetWorld+Interop, Las Vegas, May 7th, 2002 — Hitachi Data Systems, the world's fastest growing enterprise storage provider, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today announced Hitachi TrueNorth™ — a vision and strategy for open information management designed to provide enterprise customers with freedom of choice in integrating best-of-breed products to manage their storage infrastructures while leveraging high-performance storage systems.
"With TrueNorth we are continuing our collaborative approach to the storage market, forming alliances with the best providers of solutions for our customers and driving industry standards that will ease the challenges customers face in managing multi-vendor environments," said Dave Roberson, president and COO, Hitachi Data Systems. "The TrueNorth vision is that of a tight synergy among HiCommand™ standards-based storage management framework; Hitachi Freedom Storage™, powerful, intelligent storage systems, and our open and collaborative approach to our strategic alliances. Customers will benefit from choosing 'plug-and-play' applications that best fit their needs from us or our strategic partners and leveraging the power of our storage systems to run their software. This openness and ease of management will lead to reduced cost of ownership."
To fulfill the TrueNorth vision, Hitachi Data Systems will deliver an open and collaborative storage management framework, with policy-based automation tools, virtualization-assist capabilities, and storage systems that deliver the industry's highest performance, availability, and scalability. Included in this strategy is a collaborative business model that leverages the strengths of our partners to focus on addressing the needs of storage customers. As products roll out under the TrueNorth strategy, customers will be able to simplify, protect, and optimize their information infrastructures, reducing total cost of ownership and ensuring a more rapid return on investment.
"Our TrueNorth strategy is supported by a product roadmap that anticipates customer needs for the next several years," said Shinjiro Iwata, CEO, Hitachi Data Systems. "This vision, combined with our record-breaking growth and superior technology, squarely positions Hitachi Data Systems as a leader in enterprise storage management, and paves the way toward our goal of becoming the number one storage solution provider by 2004."
"Our relationship with Hitachi Data Systems extends our line of Sun StorEdge Complete Storage Solutions to the high-end data center and helps enable extreme consolidation for Sun's customers," said Jim Hebert, general manager, Network Storage, Sun Microsystems. "Hitachi's TrueNorth effort compliments Sun's Storage ONE initiative. Together we are working toward the same common customer-friendly vision of driving open industry standards for storage management."
Hitachi TrueNorth provides a vision and strategy that is based on three key elements:
"Hitachi appears to be well in tune with customer interests in storage management, as its TrueNorth vision presents users with a framework that leverages existing infrastructure investment, and yet, offers a broad administrative architecture whose key function includes the automation of remedial storage tasks," said Steve Denegri, Managing Director, RBC Capital Markets. "The end result is a comprehensive storage architecture that is, in RBC's opinion, the most advanced on the market today."
Over 50 ISVs have committed their support for the Hitachi Data Systems storage vision and for the Lightning 9900 V series, citing simplicity, intelligence, high availability, scalability and lower total cost of ownership as key benefits of the solution.
"Hitachi and VERITAS Software have a strong, long-standing relationship founded upon delivering advanced storage management to the market," said Kevin Reinis, vice president of business development and strategic alliances, VERITAS Software. "Hitachi's TrueNorth announcement supports VERITAS Software's ongoing efforts to tightly integrate our products with Hitachi Data Systems and offer proven functionality to our mutual customers."
"BMC Software provides a storage management solution that currently supports a wide range of Hitachi devices, and we certainly plan support for the new 9900 V Series solution. By enabling IT Managers to protect their mission-critical data, this new storage system offers important benefits to enterprise storage customers who are finalizing their disaster prevention and recovery strategies."
-Helmuth Klemm, Vice President, Enterprise Storage Management, BMC Software
"The combination of best-of-breed products from Brocade and Hitachi Data Systems provides SAN customers the ability to scale storage more effectively, support continuous data availability, and reduce the overall cost of storage management. Leveraging the Brocade intelligent platform for networking storage, the Hitachi Freedom Storage environment can now deliver more efficient management of information resources."
-Jay Kidd, Vice President of Product Marketing, Brocade
"Companies are looking for solutions to handle existing storage needs seamlessly, while simultaneously preparing for future growth. Hitachi Data Systems new Lightning 9900 V series is designed for the future, where high growth, massive consolidation and extreme performance will be needed. Their trademark switched bus architecture is superior to traditional bus-based storage systems which create a bottleneck as capacity is added, lowering performance. In addition, higher overall capacity and throughput make the Lightning 9900 V Series the best solution for high-demand storage environments looking to simplify SAN management."
-Mike Kahn, Chairman, Clipper Group
"Hitachi's heterogeneous storage access layer and open API framework provide us with a simplified, intelligent and standards-based platform with which to develop enhanced data and storage management solutions. By joining this platform with CommVault Galaxy's high-performance data protection for SAN-based enterprises, customers can design and implement their storage infrastructures based on today's data availability requirements, without being constrained by the technical or architectural limitations of any particular vendor."
-Anand Prahlad, Vice President of Engineering, CommVault Systems
"Customers need to be able to manage their expanding and increasingly complex storage resources in an integrated manner. Computer Associates is supporting HDS's True North to help our customers fulfill this need, which is central to our own vision of 'Managing Storage without Boundaries.' In addition, by integrating the Hitachi Management framework into BrightStor, CA will be able to add the new 9900V to our already extensive portfolio of managed devices."
-Nigel Turner, Senior Vice President of BrightStor Solutions, Computer Associates
"As an early adopter of the Hitachi HiCommand Storage Management Framework APIs, CreekPath Systems has enjoyed a strong and fruitful relationship with Hitachi Data Systems. We continue to support the HiCommand environment, and are proud to participate in Hitachi's TrueNorth, a truly strategic vision of open and collaborative storage solutions that will meet the needs of enterprise customers. By participating in Hitachi's TrueNorth vision, CreekPath System expands an incredible relationship with not only Hitachi, but with many program participants to enable CreekPath to continue providing heterogeneous policy-based, process driven storage management."
-Mike Koclanes, CTO and Founder, CreekPath Systems
"Hitachi Data Systems' new Lightning 9900 V Series promises to deliver improved performance and manageability. Emulex host bus adapters provide an ideal storage networking interconnect solution for high performance, heterogeneous SANs utilizing Hitachi's sophisticated virtualization technology and management solutions."
-Mike Smith, Executive Vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Emulex Corporation
"Hitachi Data Systems has eclipsed it's own best-in-class 9900 performance with the V series. "As storage performance once again becomes the bottleneck of the future, it's nice to know that HDS has already solved the problem. Being part of one of the worlds largest R&D organizations (Hitachi) clearly has its benefits."
-Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Storage Group
"The major challenges facing today's IT executives are managing the phenomenal growth that's occurring in storage and reducing the associated total cost of ownership. When we talk about growth most frequently you think about growth in the areas of capacity and connectivity. However, the greatest growth these days is in access rates. The unique Hi-Star switched architecture of the Lightning 9900 family has allowed Hitachi Data Systems to address these critical areas."
-Chuck Standerfer, Senior Partner, The Evaluator Group
The simplified management of the Lightning 9900 V Series helps IT administrators keep pace with rapidly changing user requirements and market demands. Users can now take advantage of the business opportunities in their markets, instead of being bogged down by their network infrastructures. By combining the Lightning 9900 V Series with INRANGE's FC/9000, customers can consolidate storage resources and create simplified storage networks increasing efficiency and reducing total cost of ownership.
-Dan Raup, Vice President of Product Marketing, InRANGE Technologies
"We applaud Hitachi's True North vision, as we too recognize the importance of industry standards for storage area management, and we are proud to a part of Hitachi's True North Developer's program. By providing timely support in PATHLINE for the new 9900 V, our mutual customers benefit from enhanced manageability, superior automation, and lower TCO."
-Karen Dutch, Vice President of Marketing, InterSAN Inc.
"Hitachi Data Systems has done a magnificent job with the Freedom Storage family, offering new levels of performance and capability for high-end enterprise storage. By building to a standards-based framework, HDS assures these new storage systems are compatible with all SAN infrastructure products qualified with the current Lightning 9900 series. This includes nearly all of JNI's HBAs, including our 2 Gb Ready PCI, SBus and CompactPCI HBAs; JNI's 1 Gb enterprise and legacy HBAs, and JNI's Zentai High Availability SAN Solutions. Hitachi Data Systems' focus on compatibility, and its philosophy of embracing a truly open standards, policy-based approach to storage management is key to winning over its customers and partners."
-Neal Waddington, President and CEO, JNI Corporation
"Hitachi Data Systems' new Lightning 9900 V Series combines high performance with intelligent storage technology. Its built-in virtualization-assist functions complement McDATA's virtualization strategy as it enables enterprise customers to not only manage rapidly increasing amounts of data, but also to make optimal use of their stored data."
-John Kelley, President and Chief Operating Officer for McDATA
"Through our sales and support partnership, Nishan and Hitachi Data Systems are able to offer our mutual customers a cost-effective IP storage solution for metro or global TrueCopy disaster recovery applications. The introduction of the Lightning 9900 V Series, paired with our wire-speed multiprotocol IP Storage switches, further boosts the performance and around-the-clock availability that our customers demand, without taxing their existing infrastructure and staff."
-Mark Hicks, Vice President, Business Development, Nishan Systems
"We chose to install Hitachi Data Systems' Lightning 9900 V Series because we were seeking a comprehensive storage platform, complete with powerful management software and an intelligent hardware infrastructure. The broad capabilities of this storage system have allowed us to consolidate and simplify our diverse infrastructure — leading to better performance and a lower total cost of ownership."
-Randy Overbey, Senior Vice President, Northern Trust
"Our switch and HBA customers tell us their most critical storage needs involve managing the increasing volume of data, providing continuous access to information, adopting an evolving set of storage technologies, and meeting the escalating requirements to better utilize resources. Hitachi Data Systems' True North initiative and HiCommand Management Framework cut through the increasing complexity of managing storage resources to meet the demands for dynamic business growth."
-Frank Berry, Vice President of Marketing, QLogic Corp
"Hitachi is extending its technological leadership with the introduction of the 9970V and 9980V model arrays. The performance levels that are achievable by these new offerings place Hitachi at the forefront of the enterprise storage market. Additionally, Hitachi appears to be well in tune with customer interests in storage management as its TrueNorth vision presents users with a framework that leverages existing infrastructure investment, and yet, offers a broad administrative architecture whose key function includes the automation of remedial storage tasks. The end result is a comprehensive storage architecture that is, in RBC's opinion, the most advanced on the market today."
-Steve Denegri, Managing Director, RBC Capital Markets
"Our relationship with Hitachi Data Systems extends our line of Sun StorEdge Complete Storage Solutions to the high-end data center and helps enable extreme consolidation for Sun's customers. "Hitachi's TrueNorth effort compliments Sun's Storage ONE initiative. Together we are working toward the same common customer-friendly vision of driving open industry standards for storage management."
-Jim Hebert, General Manager, Network Storage, Sun Microsystems
"TSYS continues to lead the industry in creating innovative software and services for all types of electronic payments. We continually search for better methods to store, access and manage the enormous amount of data we use to support our 229 million global accounts, which generate more than 6 billion transactions each year. We chose Hitachi Data Systems as our primary storage partner to streamline this process and to meet and exceed our customer requirements. Hitachi Data Systems' 9900 V Series brings a superior product to market, and its design will be a valuable part of our success as we manage the challenge of growth. The 9900 V Series is simply the most complete storage solution in the market today."
-Michael Rogers, Manager Technical Support, Architecture, TSYS
"Hitachi and VERITAS Software have a strong, long-standing relationship founded upon delivering advanced storage management to the market. Hitachi's TrueNorth announcement supports VERITAS Software's ongoing efforts to tightly integrate our products with Hitachi Data Systems and offer proven functionality to our mutual customers."
-Kevin Reinis, Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances, VERITAS Software
Hitachi Data Systems, the fastest growing enterprise storage provider, is a leading supplier of storage hardware, software, solutions and services. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), Japan's largest electronics company, Hitachi Data Systems is committed to providing the storage infrastructure for the world's most information-intensive corporations. With 2,600 employees, Hitachi Data Systems does business through direct sales and resellers in the public and private sectors in 170 countries and regions on six continents. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies.
Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 2001 (ended March 31, 2002) consolidated sales of 7,993.7 billion yen ($60.1 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.hitachi.com.
Contacts: PR
Jodi Reinman, Hitachi Data Systems, (408) 970.1050, jodi.reinman@hds.com
At an exchange rate of 133 yen to the dollar.
Freedom Storage, Lightning 9900, and HiCommand are trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems.
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