SYSTEMS

LAS VEGAS, NV -- Hitachi Data Systems, the world's fastest growing enterprise storage provider, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today announced Hitachi TrueNorth(TM) -- a vision and strategy for open information management designed to provide enterprise customers with freedom of choice in integrating best-of-breed products to manage their storage infrastructures while leveraging high-performance storage systems. "With TrueNorth we are continuing our collaborative approach to the storage market, forming alliances with the best providers of solutions for our customers and driving industry standards that will ease the challenges customers face in managing multi-vendor environments," said Dave Roberson, president and COO, Hitachi Data Systems. "The TrueNorth vision is that of a tight synergy among HiCommand, our standards-based storage management framework; Hitachi Freedom Storage, powerful, intelligent storage systems, and our open and collaborative approach to our strategic alliances. Customers will benefit from choosing `plug-and-play' applications that best fit their needs from us or our strategic partners and leveraging the power of our storage systems to run their software. This openness and ease of management will lead to reduced cost of ownership." To fulfill the TrueNorth vision, Hitachi Data Systems will deliver an open and collaborative storage management framework, with policy-based automation tools, virtualization-assist capabilities, and storage systems that deliver the industry's highest performance, availability, and scalability. Included in this strategy is a collaborative business model that leverages the strengths of our partners to focus on addressing the needs of storage customers. As products roll out under the TrueNorth strategy, customers will be able to simplify, protect, and optimize their information infrastructures, reducing total cost of ownership and ensuring a more rapid return on investment. "Our TrueNorth strategy is supported by a product roadmap that anticipates customer needs for the next several years," said Shinjiro Iwata, CEO, Hitachi Data Systems. "This vision, combined with our record-breaking growth and superior technology, squarely positions Hitachi Data Systems as a leader in enterprise storage management, and paves the way toward our goal of becoming the number one storage solution provider by 2004." "Our relationship with Hitachi Data Systems extends our line of Sun StorEdge Complete Storage Solutions to the high-end data center and helps enable extreme consolidation for Sun's customers," said Jim Hebert, general manager, Network Storage, Sun Microsystems. "Hitachi's TrueNorth effort compliments Sun's Storage ONE initiative. Together we are working toward the same common customer-friendly vision of driving open industry standards for storage management." Hitachi TrueNorth provides a vision and strategy that is based on three key elements: *HiCommand(TM) Management Framework - an open, standards-based, storage management framework that enables the choice of best-of-breed solutions. Beginning with HiCommand Device Manager, the framework will expand to provide a modular design, based on industry standards, the Common Information Model (CIM), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and a policy-based automation module. The CIM/SOAP standards-based message bus allows individual functional components from Hitachi or independent software developers to "plug and play." The HiCommand Management Framework is open, modular, and extensible. This enables customers to build their most suitable management environment based on a combination of Hitachi products and best-of-breed storage hardware and software from other vendors. HiCommand is customizable to integrate easily with existing infrastructures and accommodate future growth plans. *Hitachi Freedom Storage(TM) Intelligent Systems - a family of scalable storage platforms with different levels of management assist features. The Hitachi Freedom Storage products include the Thunder 9200(TM) distributed, modular storage system, the Lightning 9900(TM) Series global cache storage system, and the new Hitachi Freedom Storage(TM) Lightning 9900(TM) V Series with virtualization assist features. These systems offer high availability and scalable capacity and performance to meet a wide range of customer needs. All these products, in addition to the Sun(TM) StorEdge(TM) 9900 Series and T3 storage arrays, are supported by the HiCommand Device Manager. *Collaborative business model - an approach that leverages the strengths of Hitachi Data Systems and its partners and enables freedom of choice. The HiCommand Developer's program provides a set of APIs, support, and a testing environment for independent software vendors (ISVs). Hitachi Data Systems will also work with partners such as Sun with its complimentary Storage ONE strategy, to drive open industry standards for storage management, easing the administration burden for enterprise customers. "Hitachi appears to be well in tune with customer interests in storage management, as its TrueNorth vision presents users with a framework that leverages existing infrastructure investment, and yet, offers a broad administrative architecture whose key function includes the automation of remedial storage tasks," said Steve Denegri, Managing Director, RBC Capital Markets. "The end result is a comprehensive storage architecture that is, in RBC's opinion, the most advanced on the market today." ISV Support for Hitachi TrueNorth Over 50 ISVs have committed their support for the Hitachi Data Systems storage vision and for the Lightning 9900 V series, citing simplicity, intelligence, high availability, scalability and lower total cost of ownership as key benefits of the solution. "Hitachi and VERITAS Software have a strong, long-standing relationship founded upon delivering advanced storage management to the market," said Kevin Reinis, vice president of business development and strategic alliances, VERITAS Software. "Hitachi's TrueNorth announcement supports VERITAS Software's ongoing efforts to tightly integrate our products with Hitachi Data Systems and offer proven functionality to our mutual customers." Visit www.hds.com for further information.