Hitachi places company-wide emphasis on accelerating NAS revenues and taking market share with armada of new products in 2005
Leading market research firm forecasts NAS market to expand by 70% to exceed $3.0 billion by 2008
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. April 4, 2005 - Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), today announced a full-scale product assault on the network attached storage (NAS) market, signaling the introduction of multiple new NAS products spanning the high-end enterprise to the SMB markets.
Hitachi begins its aggressive NAS product rollout in 2005 with the introduction of next generation embedded NAS Blades for the TagmaStore™ Universal Storage Platform products which, at introduction, will sell for 1/3rd the price of comparable NAS gateways and filers. With the newly introduced NAS Blades, Hitachi will focus on capturing new NAS gateway and filer sales opportunities, and consolidating all existing NAS gateways and filers in an enterprise environment.
Just one NAS Blade enables consolidation of multiple NAS filers and large NAS workloads, and reduces the cost and headaches of procuring and managing dozens of islands of file servers or NAS filer appliances.
As leading market research firm IDC currently forecasts the NAS market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.7%, reaching $3.089B by 2008; the price/performance metrics of Hitachi's new NAS Blade alone represent a significant opportunity for the company to aggressively take market share from established NAS vendors.
Following the introduction of embedded NAS Blades in its high-end systems, Hitachi's strategy is to introduce a series of channel-optimized midrange NAS offerings targeting the fast-growing Windows and Linux-based SMB markets. The strategy calls for these offerings to feature the most advanced NAS technologies in the industry at aggressive price points with multiple configuration options.
"The market needs to be aware: Hitachi is coming at the NAS market strong and hard," said Shinjiro Iwata, CEO, Hitachi Data Systems. "Hitachi, Ltd., HDS' parent company, is focusing vast resources on taking market share in the NAS market, and has designed an impressive set of products which it plans to unveil in 2005. By leveraging the technologies introduced with the revolutionary TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, these products will incorporate business-enabling features and functions that simply do not exist in the current NAS industry landscape."
The Hitachi NAS Blade is the first embedded NAS blade to provide co-existence of NAS and SAN data in the same storage pool under common management. The fully-featured NAS Blade is integrated with the Universal Storage Platform, and able to exploit all of its advanced virtualization capabilities.
"Customers are increasingly looking for solutions that deliver block and file services from a centrally managed pool of storage resources," said John McArthur, group vice president and general manager of Information Infrastructure Research at IDC. "Hitachi, Ltd. offers a unique solution that enables SAN and NAS to coexist within a single, highly scalable, centrally managed storage system, leveraging an embedded NAS blade architecture."
Customers can create tiered storage environments by moving NAS data to any storage system attached to the Universal Storage Platform via its Universal Virtualization Layer—such as EMC Symmetrix and CLARiiON CX series storage systems, and IBM TotalStorage DS4000 and ESS 2105 models—and integrate management of all SAN and NAS resources, with a single point of management for all data classes (NAS, FC, SATA, ATA, ESCON, FICON).
"By providing embedded NAS Blades in the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform we are delivering an intelligent platform for future storage and data applications. This provides better management, security, and significantly lower cost of infrastructure for network connectivity," said Fred Huang, vice president, Storage Infrastructure Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. "With today's announcement, customers can eliminate the need for external cabling, thereby simplifying their access to Fibre Channel and IP protocols across the enterprise—and lower their management costs by consolidating multiple images into one technically elegant, highly available, highly reliable NAS solution. Additionally, our customers can manage all of their storage assets from the Hitachi HiCommand® Suite, further reducing cost of ownership."
"Offering a NAS blade in the USP is a smart move," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "HDS customers now have SAN and NAS storage in a single system that leverages the value of the USP including its scalability, reliability, data protection, and virtualization capabilities. For USP customers the HDS NAS blade should be a no-brainer. For customers evaluating the USP, the combination of SAN and NAS makes it an even more compelling solution."
The Hitachi NAS Blade for the TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform is now generally available.
Hitachi Data Systems leverages global R&D resources to develop storage solutions built on industry-leading technology with the performance, availability and scalability to maximize customers' ROI and minimize their risk. By focusing on the customer's perspective as we apply the best hardware, software, and services from Hitachi and our partners, we uniquely satisfy our customers' business needs.
With 2,900 employees, Hitachi Data Systems conducts business through direct and indirect channels in the public, government and private sectors in over 170 countries and regions. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.
Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company, with approximately 326,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2003 (ended March 31, 2004) 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.
Hitachi Data Systems
Tony Hynes
(408) 970-4836
tony.hynes@hds.com
Blanc & Otus Public Relations
Quinn Daly
(415) 856-5152
qdaly@blancandotus.com
© 2005, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. Hitachi Data Systems is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. TagmaStore, Universal Star Network and Services Oriented Storage Solutions are trademarks of Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. All other trade names, trademarks, and service marks used herein are the rightful property of their respective owners.
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