SYSTEMS

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today announced the immediate availability of 2 Gigabit-per-second Fibre Channel connectivity on its midrange Hitachi Freedom Storage(TM) Thunder 9200(TM) disk arrays. This speed is twice as fast as the Fibre Channel connectivity provided by other vendors, enabling customers to access data faster and make quicker decisions. Today's announcement marks HDS as the first storage vendor to market with 2Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity on a RAID storage system. HDS has been delivering Thunder 9200 storage systems with 2 Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity to customers for over two months, with general availability today. "Key systems vendors are beginning to introduce servers with 2Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity. As the first storage system supporting 2 Gbps Fibre connectivity the Thunder 9200 becomes the midrange data storage repository of choice," said Marlene Woodworth, HDS vice president, Enterprise Products and Solutions. "While our competition likes to talk about technology leadership, Hitachi continues to demonstrate it. Customers will, once again, benefit from our leadership." Commenting on today's announcement, Steve Denegri, Managing Director of System Area Networking Research at securities firm Dain Rauscher Wessels, said, "HDS is the first enterprise storage vendor to market with 2-gigabit Fibre Channel host connectivity, a meaningful advantage in a market where differentiation is a must in order to gain mindshare with the customer. We look for HDS to potentially gain further traction with key partners as its design innovation begins to deliver increasing strategic dividends." Designed with a high-performance, all-fibre architecture that delivers a system bandwidth two to four times greater than competitive offerings, the Thunder 9200 allows users to accommodate substantial increases in workload. The Thunder 9200 scales in a single configuration from 36 gigabytes (GB) to 7.2 terabytes (TB) of capacity, packaged in flexible rackmount or deskside configurations to support easy upgrades as capacity needs expand. The combination of high scalability, high performance, and advanced Java-based GUI management capabilities, all at an affordable price, makes the Thunder 9200 ideal for such applications as E-commerce, data mart/data mining, messaging, and Web servers, as well as storage consolidation for Network Attached Storage (NAS) and SANs in Windows NT/2000(R) and UNIX(R) environments. For further information access www.hds.com