Features - Storage Innovations:

HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS FIRST W/ NEXT GEN. MODULAR STORAGE TECH.

Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd, introduced a major shift in the modular storage market with its announcement of the Hitachi Thunder 9580V, an ultra high-end modular storage system that outperforms all competitive products. The Thunder 9580V extends the application capabilities of modular storage and allows customers to cost-effectively do more, including multi-tiered storage deployment in combination with the Hitachi Lightning 9900 V Series, and large-scale consolidation of mid-range JBOD or older, enterprise-class storage.

"Hitachi Data Systems' Thunder 9580V announcement has established new records of scalability and throughput for enterprise mid-range storage subsystems," said Josh Krischer, vice president and research director at Gartner Inc. "It will allow enterprises to exploit the benefits of storage consolidation with lower investments. These 9580V enhancements allow customers to expand their use of the Virtual Storage Ports feature, which allows heterogeneous platform connectivity to scale without having to add storage units."

Built on many of the same technologies as Hitachi Data Systems' other leading storage systems, the Thunder 9580V addresses the real needs of the growing networked storage market:

• Capacity -- 64TB of raw capacity, twice that of its nearest competitor
• Performance -- 7.4 GB per second of cached bandwidth, nearly six times that of its nearest competitor
• Connectivity -- 1,024 Virtual Storage Ports with secure multi-tenancy, a technology available only from Hitachi; and, 2,048 LUNs, four times that of its nearest competitor
• Data Protection & Business Continuity -- Hitachi QuickShadow copy-on-write snapshot software reduces storage requirements for data protection while Hitachi HiCopy cross-system replication facilitates data movement between Thunder 9500 V Series and Lightning 9900 V Series storage tiers

Combined, these strengths make the Thunder 9580V the ideal system for: departmental or SME storage consolidation; enhancing the ability to perform concurrent operations such as business continuity and parallel applications; and effective data replication strategies across the enterprise.

"Hitachi Data Systems has taken a close look at its customer's needs," said Ron Johnson, a senior partner and analyst at the Evaluator Group, "and has addressed many of them with the Thunder 9580V. This is a product that other vendors will be forced to address. By providing dramatic increases in capacity, performance, and connectivity, especially the increase in LUNs to 2,048, the Thunder 9580V brings aggressive storage consolidation to the Small to Medium Enterprise segment."

"As one of Hitachi Data Systems' top resellers, we are excited about the 9580V because it's a product we can really sell," said Karin Napier, vice president of sales at Integrated Archive Systems Inc. "With its feature mix -- high capacity, high performance, high availability and real data protection tools, along with its smooth integration with the Lightning series -- the 9580V is ideally suited to address the challenges my customers face."

"Customers have three major areas of concern," said Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer at Hitachi Data Systems. "The growth of distributed services and applications, which require greater storage capacity and throughput to perform as needed; the accelerating move from DAS to networked storage (NAS and SAN) at all levels of the enterprise, which calls for greater performance and connectivity; and the ever present concern around disaster recovery and business continuity, which requires the ability to replicate and restore data quickly and efficiently. The Thunder 9580V is the only modular storage system to fully address these concerns and will change the way storage is used in the enterprise."

Key Advantages

• Capacity

The Thunder 9580V delivers truly scalable capacity -- up to 64TB in SAN, NAS, DAS or Cluster configurations. Customers can refine their systems by selecting the drive size and speed best suited to their applications. Drive options include 36GB (15K RPM), 73GB (10K/15K RPM) and 146GB (10K RPM). The Thunder 9580V provides this capacity in a small, modular footprint which enables customers to scale capacity and performance by simply adding disk modules.

• Performance

Each Thunder 9580V includes two Hi-PER controllers that manage the information flow throughout the system; 8GB of mirrored cache memory, which improves performance by eliminating mechanical delays, and protection by maintaining non-volatile copies of data before it is written to disk; and eight front-end and eight back-end ports -- twice the number previously available -- that ensure controllers always operate at peak efficiency.

• Connectivity

The Thunder 9500 V Series is the only family of modular storage systems to offer Virtual Storage Ports. With the Thunder 9580V, Hitachi Data Systems has doubled the number of Virtual Storage Ports to 1,024. Multiple open systems hosts, regardless of their platform or operating system, are able to access their own virtual private storage housed on a Thunder 9580V storage system with no threat of exposure to other hosts. This secure multi-tenant capability allows customers to reduce their network infrastructure costs and extend the benefits of Thunder-class storage to a wider range of applications.

• Data Protection and Business Continuity

Hitachi QuickShadow copy-on-write snapshot software offers point-in-time copies without requiring a full volume backup. QuickShadow copies only changed data, allowing more frequent restore points for faster resumption of service with minimal storage requirements. With QuickShadow, customers can maintain copies of their data at multiple points-in-time for recovery to any previously saved version.

Hitachi HiCopy cross-system replication software facilitates data movement between Lightning 9900 V Series and Thunder 9500 V Series storage systems. With HiCopy, customers benefit from consolidated backup capabilities and the ability to move data between tiers, either within a data center or across remote locations. This enables an enterprise-wide, tiered storage strategy manageable through a single interface, the HiCommand Device Manager.

• Investment Protection

The Thunder 9500 V Series and Lightning 9900 V Series share many of the same storage applications, under the common HiCommand management umbrella. This provides important benefits to storage administrators, as any investments made in training are equally applicable to both platforms. Any scripts or business rules developed for one platform are portable between these two systems.

Hitachi has also taken steps to protect customers' investments in existing Thunder 9500 V Series drives and disk modules by allowing them to be used with the new Thunder 9580V. The use of existing drives and disk modules does not require any special preparation or data migration steps so transitional downtime is minimized.

Pricing and Availability

The Hitachi Thunder 9580V is available in November, 2003. Prices range from $110,000 to $500,000, depending on configuration. HiCopy and QuickShadow software will be available within the next 90 days.

About Hitachi Data Systems

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 2,700 employees, Hitachi Data Systems conducts business through direct and indirect channels in the public, government and private sectors in over 170 countries. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.

About Hitachi Ltd

Hitachi Ltd, headquartered in Tokyo, is a leading global electronics company, with approximately 340,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2002 (ended March 31) consolidated sales totaled 8,191.7 billion yen ($68.3 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 global.hitachi.com.