HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS VALIDATES INTEROPERABILITY OF STORAGE WITH ORACLE PARALLEL SERVER ON MAJOR OPEN-SYSTEMS PLATFORMS

Just one month after highlighting an expansion of its long-standing relationship with Oracle Corp., Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has announced some key steps toward delivering the benefits of this alliance to its customers. HDS, in cooperation with Oracle, reported it has completed tests validating the interoperability of Hitachi Freedom Storage products and Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) running on widely used UNIX-based platforms. It was also verified that Hitachi Freedom Storage is completely compatible with OPS on Intel-based Windows NT servers.

OPS, an option of Oracle 8 Enterprise Edition, provides a unique database solution for enterprise customers seeking fault tolerance, availability, and scalability for their mission-critical systems. The Parallel Server option permits users and applications running on any node of a loosely coupled system, either in a cluster or on a massively parallel processing platform, to access all data in a database. This allows OPS to exploit the full processing power of multiple machines running high performance applications such as on-line transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing.

Validation of Hitachi Freedom Storage for use with OPS is another important step toward fully implementing HDS' vision of accessing any data from any computer, anywhere, at any time. The Hitachi Freedom Storage family includes the multi-platform Freedom 7700E for use in data centers, the just-announced Freedom 5800, which is ideally suited for clustered server and Storage Area Network environments, and the Freedom 5700E for use in distributed environments. Interoperability with OPS has been proven for all members of the Hitachi Freedom Storage family when used with HP-UX, Solaris, and Windows NT operating systems. Interoperability of the Freedom 7700E and 5700E with OPS on Digital UNIX has also been validated. HDS is continuing its interoperability testing with Oracle to broaden the range of open-systems options for customers.

Hitachi Freedom Storage and the Oracle Parallel Server are each designed for high performance, scalability and availability in clustered-server environments. Together they offer a solution that allows customers to seamlessly and non-disruptively add servers and storage capacity to support rapidly growing corporate databases.

"Customers want assurance that our storage systems provide high-availability support for the applications they depend on," said James E. Harris, HDS Group Vice President, Global and Alliances. "That's why we're focusing on application-based solutions. Now that we've proved the interoperability of the Hitachi Freedom Storage subsystems and Oracle's Parallel Server, open-systems users will have a compelling solution for high-performance, high-availability operations."

For more information, see http://www.hds.com