Organizations Worldwide Achieve 50 Percent Performance, Sustainability and Cost Savings Improvements with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), today announced that enterprise customers across all industries are transforming their data centers and laying the foundation for cloud computing models using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). By offering best-in-class performance, capacity and open, multivendor storage virtualization for large businesses and enterprises, Hitachi VSP helps organizations build massive scalability with virtualized server environments and pave the way for cloud deployments. Customers include GRZ IT Center Linz (Austria), Schweizerische Mobiliar (Switzerland), Seattle Children’s (United States), and Teliti Datacentres (Malaysia). In less than one year, HDS has shipped more than 1,400 VSP systems to hundreds of customers and added new footprints, making VSP the most successful product introduction in HDS history.

“Organizations continue to look for simple and effective solutions to develop and manage their virtualized data centers to reduce risk and operational costs, increase sustainability, and realize greater return on their storage assets,” said Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi VSP is a cornerstone of our vision to transform data centers into dynamic information centers where content is seamlessly accessible and resides in a virtualized environment. Customers benefit from the ability to scale up, out and deep for unprecedented levels of agility and cost savings in their virtualized data centers. Coupled with the system’s data migration and page-level dynamic tiering, enterprises can greatly reduce outage windows and automate data movement to the most appropriate storage location to simplify and optimize tier costs and performance.”

According to a recent survey conducted by TechValidate, an independent research organization that provides organizations with third-party customer data, more than half of enterprises powered by Hitachi VSP have increased performance up to 50 percent. These enterprises point to simplification of storage management as the most critical business challenge addressed by VSP in their data centers. Additionally, organizations expect to save up to 50 percent on administration and energy costs as compared to competitive offerings, making it the most efficient enterprise storage platform on the market today.

Supporting Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Customer Quotes

• GRZ IT Center Linz GmbH, Austrian computer center: “In the business intelligence division of GRZ IT Center Linz, a powerful data warehouse solution is a prerequisite for queries in seconds, as well as up-to-date records and borderless OLAP cubes. As the existing storage infrastructure was at its full capacity, GRZ IT Center Linz needed to invest in a new system and advanced technology. We selected Hitachi VSP based on its easy integration into the existing tiered storage approach, improved performance, higher scalability, an excellent cost-performance ratio, and optimal service quality. Since implementation, we’ve seen extremely impressive performance results, including throughput of a single database server of 2.5 MB/sec and reduced loading time in half. Furthermore, with Hitachi VSP, we have massively reduced the storage costs per TB.” – Ernst Nimmervoll, managing director
• Schweizerische Mobiliar, Swiss insurance organization: “The scalability and performance of Hitachi VSP fully meets our expectations while at the same time reducing energy costs. Furthermore, management of the new Hitachi Command Suite has become significantly easier. In summary, the result is a TCO savings of 25%.” – Renato Grendelmeier, head of storage
• Seattle Children’s, premier child health care and pediatric center: “As a clinical care facility with a team of over 4,700 employees, we depend on Hitachi VSP as a core component of our IT infrastructure to deliver unified access to a wealth of hospital applications and provide exceptional patient care. We deployed Hitachi VSP as part of our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure project. We are benefiting from faster response times and improved desktop performance.” – Mike Kindle, senior director, Enterprise Architecture
• Teliti Datacentres, premier IT service provider in Malaysia: “Our data center offers cloud computing services with virtualization capabilities and provides provisioning on demand with thin provisioning technology. Hitachi VSP, deployed with VMware technology, enables Teliti to deliver benefits in performance, flexibility, power consumption and TCO to our customers. Additionally, VSP enables Teliti to reduce disk drive costs by up to 70% compared with non-tiered and non-virtualized storage platforms and achieve significant reductions in power, cooling and floor space costs.” – Encik Musa Mohd. Lazim, chief executive officer

Recent Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Milestones

Alongside Hitachi Command Suite management software, which can scale many virtual machines and manages even the largest infrastructures and application deployments, Hitachi VSP received the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s prestigious Machine Design Award sponsored by Business and Technology Daily News in Japan. Hitachi VSP was also awarded the iF Product Design Award for 2011, China Information World 2010 Editors’ Choice for “Innovative Product,” and the 2011 Information Age Data Centre Award – all of which champion superior technology products and designs for the data center.

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About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems provides best-in-class information technologies, services and solutions that deliver compelling customer ROI, unmatched return on assets (ROA) and demonstrable business impact. With a vision that IT must be virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable, Hitachi Data Systems offers solutions that improve IT costs and agility. With more than 4,900 employees worldwide, Hitachi Data Systems does business in more than 100 countries and regions. Hitachi Data Systems products, services and solutions are trusted by the world’s leading enterprises, including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 and more than 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100. Hitachi Data Systems believes that data drives our world – and information is the new currency. To learn more, visit: 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 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2010 (ended March 31, 2011) consolidated revenues totaled 9,315 billion yen ($112.2 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2011. All Rights Reserved. Hitachi is a registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Hitachi Data Systems is a registered trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. in the United States and other countries.