STORAGE

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Hitachi Data Systems, the world's fastest growing enterprise storage provider and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today announced further commitment to the adoption of open standards for storage networking with its full support of the SNIA Storage Management Initiative (SMI). Hitachi Data Systems' endorsement of the SNIA SMI aligns with the company's TrueNorth(TM) vision and strategy for open information management. The goal of both efforts is to provide customers with the freedom of choice to take advantage of multi-vendor, interoperable storage networking solutions based on industry standards. The SNIA SMI is an organization-wide program to develop, standardize, and drive the adoption of an open storage management interface based on the Bluefin draft specification. The Bluefin specification is the cornerstone of the SMI standard and describes an enhanced CIM (Common Information Model) / WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management) interface for discovering, managing, and monitoring devices on a storage network. Hitachi, Ltd. is a founding supporter of the Partner Development Process (PDP) and technical contributor to the Bluefin specification. By providing a standard storage management interface, the SMI will enable simplified storage management of multi-vendor SANs. "As heterogeneous storage networks grow, management and interoperability are customers' top concerns. By removing the management interoperability bottleneck, a standard interface will allow customers to select the best management solutions based on their ability to solve critical business issues rather than on their ability to work with particular products," said Scott Genereux, vice president, Global Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. "We have worked closely with the SNIA from its inception and fully support the Storage Management Initiative. The SMI vision is consistent with our commitment to an open, collaborative approach to the storage market. This is a significant milestone in providing customers with the ability to manage multi-vendor storage infrastructures based on open industry standards." Under the TrueNorth(TM) strategy, Hitachi Data Systems recently announced its next-generation Hitachi Freedom Storage(TM) Lightning 9900(TM) V systems and the HiCommand(TM) Management Framework, an open, standards-based tool. This strategy provides customers with freedom of choice in integrating best-of-breed products to manage their storage infrastructures while leveraging high-performance storage systems. "Hitachi Data Systems and other PDP companies have significantly accelerated the process for developing a storage management standard for the industry by creating the Bluefin specification and submitting it to SNIA for further development. The SNIA looks forward to having Hitachi Data Systems' continued involvement in SNIA work group activities to develop Bluefin into a complete management standard," said Arnold Jones, SNIA Technical Director.