Hitachi Data Systems Unveils Strong New Suite of Storage Solutions for Customers in Medium-Sized Enterprises

Hitachi Enables Medium-Sized Companies to Better Manage Growth, Back-up and Recovery, and Compliance with Enterprise-Class Functionality at a Mid-Market Price

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – December 18, 2006—Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, provider of Application Optimized Storage™ solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), today launched a suite of new solutions designed to address the growing storage requirements of medium-sized companies around the world. Continuing on the company’s laser focus to bring leading enterprise capabilities to a broader set of customers, Hitachi’s powerful suite of solutions delivers enterprise-grade data protection, storage consolidation, and improved management of Microsoft Windows and SQL Server environments at a mid-market price. Here are the broad range of solutions made available by Hitachi Data Systems today:

Microsoft-Based Solutions
Many mid-sized companies that depend on the Microsoft platform for mission-critical applications are faced with challenges such as managing availability, scaling quickly to keep pace with growth, meeting tight backup windows, ensuring that Microsoft applications co-exist reliably with other software platforms, and protecting critical systems from attacks on privacy, security and integrity. Hitachi Data Systems Solutions for Microsoft Environments provide fully integrated, high-performance methods to quickly lower the costs of managing Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server environments.

Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Solutions
Business continuity, regulatory compliance and data recovery can be expensive and resource-intensive requirements for mid-sized organizations today. Hitachi Data Systems Solutions for Data Protection and Disaster Recovery, which are easy to install and manage on a limited budget, can simplify administration of sophisticated cross-platform data protection strategies and significantly reduce overall administrative time to ensure lower total cost of ownership.

Simplification and Consolidation Solutions
Exponential data growth in mid-sized organizations often leads to unwieldy proliferation of servers, operating systems, and storage solutions requiring multiple management tools and interfaces. Storage administrators are faced with challenges such as hard-to-manage “islands” of underutilized equipment, poor backup and restore performance, excessive staffing requirements and both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. Hitachi Data Systems Solutions for Storage Consolidation simplify and centralize data storage, providing easy, cost-effective ways to deploy, maintain and scale storage configurations to accommodate increasingly complex business needs.

Today, many mid-sized companies are facing the same challenges as large enterprises—complex environments, high people costs due to fragmented management tools, valuable data that is poorly protected, growth that is difficult to accommodate, less than optimal application performance, and solutions that are expensive and difficult to implement. With Hitachi’s new suite of storage solutions, mid-sized companies can eliminate the complexity in storage infrastructure deployment; protect against and recover quickly from application data corruption; minimize application downtime; and eliminate unreliable data backup procedures.

These new solutions are targeted specifically to make it easier for our channel partners to support the needs of our fastest growing customers in the medium-sized enterprises.

“In the face of growing global competition and regulatory compliance, managing IT infrastructure and protecting critical business applications has become a tremendous challenge for most organizations, especially for resource constrained mid-sized companies,” said Karen Sigman, vice president, Global Channels, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi‘s new solutions for the mid-market enable customers to deploy enterprise-class capabilities to easily and cost effectively consolidate their storage, simplify their infrastructures and protect their data assets—so they can focus more on their core business operations and less on storage.”

“Hitachi Data Systems’ new suite of solutions provides great benefits to the partners as well as the customers they are serving,” said Janet Waxman, vice president, Hardware Channels Research, IDC Research. “All data is critical and customers are not willing to let go, or in some cases not allowed to let go of any of it, therefore the partner opportunity to bring simplification to data management for customers in the mid-market is a tremendous growth opportunity for these partners. This allows the partner to leverage Hitachi’s offering as a tool from which the partner can add services for a completely integrated solution.”

“Hitachi has made significant strides in simplifying IT infrastructure for the mid-market,” said John Costello, vice president, Segment Marketing, Gateway. “We are excited to add Hitachi’s new software suite into the portfolio of solutions we build for our customers. This new technology allows us to extend the value that the Hitachi-Gateway alliance delivers to the mid-market.”

“The year 2007 is a key milestone for Microsoft infrastructure upgrades. Customers will use this opportunity to leverage new functionality and releases, like Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Vista,” said Randy De Meno, chief Microsoft evangelist, CommVault. “CommVault is pleased to work with Hitachi Data Systems as a technology partner to deliver solutions for enterprise data protection which will truly benefit our joint customers as they upgrade their mission critical Microsoft data.”

The new Hitachi Data Systems Mid-Market Solutions for Storage Consolidation, Data Protection and Disaster Recovery and Microsoft Environments are available today.

For more information on Hitachi Data Systems solutions for the mid-market, visit http://www.hds.com/solutions/.
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 approximately 3,200 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 http://www.hds.com.
About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 356,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2005 (ended March 31, 2006) consolidated sales totaled 9,464 billion yen ($80.9 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 website at http://www.hitachi.com.

© 2006, 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. Application Optimized Storage is a trademark 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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