News Releases

11/16/2010

HITACHI GST IS FIRST HARD DRIVE SUPPLIER TO DELIVER ENTERPRISE-CLASS SAS AND FC SOLID STATE DRIVES

-- Hitachi Brings Proven Enterprise Storage Expertise to the Growing SSD Market; Ultrastar SSDs Deliver the Performance, Reliability and Endurance Needed to Maximize the Tiered Storage Opportunity --

SAN JOSE, Calif., November 16, 2010 – Leveraging more than 50 years of design and qualification experience, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new Ultrastar™ solid state drive (SSD) family. The new Ultrastar SSD400S family comes in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities, featuring both 2.5-inch 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5-inch 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. As the world’s first jointly developed SAS and FC enterprise-class SSDs, the Ultrastar SSD400S family combines Hitachi’s proven enterprise hard disk drive (HDD) expertise with Intel®’s extensive capabilities in developing high-endurance 34-nanometer (nm), single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory and advanced SSD technology. This combination provides unique value to customers who are increasingly looking to tiered storage as a method of managing the escalating performance, capacity, endurance and reliability demands of today's data centers.

“Hitachi’s strategic investment and commitment in the enterprise market is evident with the new Ultrastar SSD family. Our new SSD product family not only symbolizes our market opportunity to serve evolving cloud data center infrastructures, but also delivers value to our customers in terms of increasing data center performance and reducing total cost of ownership,” said Mike Cordano, executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Hitachi GST. “We have a strong track record of working with global enterprise customers and are proud to report favorable responses to the Ultrastar SSD400S family. With qualifications now underway, we anticipate volume shipments to commence in the first half of 2011.”

With its legacy in hard drive innovation and years of experience in working with enterprise OEMs, Hitachi GST continues to make great strides in storage and controller technology to deliver high-quality, reliable storage solutions. Intel’s focus and investment in NAND flash memory research and SSD development provides industry-leading advancements in next-generation NAND lithography and offers high-endurance SSD technology. Together, Hitachi and Intel make a unique partnership, fueling next-generation ultra-performance data centers. Hitachi was the first enterprise storage company to pursue this partnership model in late 2008.

“Our vision of bringing high-performance, high-endurance NAND technology to the forefront of the enterprise market is reflected in Hitachi GST’s announcement today,” said Tom Rampone, Intel vice president and general manager of the Intel NAND Solutions Group. “Hitachi, in collaboration with Intel, delivers a compelling solution that addresses the ultra-high performance needs of the enterprise, while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of tiered enterprise server and storage workloads.”

The enterprise SSD market is growing at an estimated 73 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2009-2014.1 Social networks, mobile applications, web TV, online video services and new tablet-like devices – all operating in the cloud – are fueling the need for faster storage solutions and improvements in high throughput and I/O performance so data can be delivered to consumers with virtually no latency. Meanwhile, data centers are pushing the boundaries to make storage more efficient, from reducing floor space, power and cooling to leveraging next-generation technologies, like virtualization, deduplication and thin provisioning. All of this is causing a shift in how today’s IT managers are building tomorrow’s data centers.

Hitachi understands enterprise storage needs – from controllers, firmware, BIOS and operating systems (OS). With a global Systems Integration Technology Lab (SIT Lab), Hitachi works to ensure compatibility and ease of integration into new or existing tier 0 enterprise storage systems and designs. This makes it easier to bring products to market more quickly and cost-effectively. With this level of commitment, the Ultrastar SSD family has been and continues to be rigorously tested in dozens of OEM system platforms across nearly a hundred configurations resulting in millions of drive hours under test.

Working in collaboration with Intel, the Ultrastar SSD400S family combines enterprise-grade NAND flash, proprietary endurance firmware and power loss management techniques to extend the reliability, endurance and sustained performance of the new SSD family. The 400GB SSD can endure up to 35 petabytes (PB) of random writes over the life of the drive, which is the equivalent of writing 19.2TB/day for five years, ensuring greater utilization and reliability in the most demanding enterprise environments. For complete end-to-end data protection and reliability, the Ultrastar SSD400S family includes advanced data integrity and power loss management technologies that are tied with industry standards to ensure compatibility in multi-tiered SSD/HDD system designs.

The new Ultrastar SSD400S family delivers the industry’s highest sequential throughput. It is the first to reach up to 535MB/s read and 500MB/s write throughput with 6Gb/s SAS, and 390MB/s read and 340MB/s write throughput with 4Gb/s FC. The new drive also delivers up to 46,000 read and 13,000 sustained write IOPS, reaching speeds 100 times faster than traditional hard drives, resulting in rapid response times for real-time transaction processing access to “hot” enterprise data for improved productivity and operational efficiency. As fewer SSDs are required to achieve the same HDD ultra-high performance, the new Ultrastar SSD400S family offers significant value in terms of IOPS per Watt, while reducing TCO through low power consumption, efficient cooling and reduced space requirements.

“Extending our relationship with Hitachi GST for enterprise-class SSDs in our SBB storage arrays and storage application platforms was the preferred option for us," said Ahmed Shihab, vice president of Strategic Planning at Xyratex. "Because of our experience working with Hitachi GST, we are confident that the new enterprise-class SSDs will deliver the excellent reliability, high availability, maximum endurance and sustained performance that our enterprise storage customers demand.”

“Flash-based storage has the potential to impact data centers in very positive ways, but cost and reliability concerns persist for enterprise IT managers seeking to leverage SSD technology,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager for Solid State Drives at IDC. “SSD solutions, such as Hitachi GST's Ultrastar SSDs, can help address these concerns by delivering high reliability, efficiency and predictable performance – all which will help fuel mainstream enterprise adoption of flash storage over the next few years.”

“Hitachi’s new SSDs sport an abundance of specification superlatives; yet this technical prowess is paired with a strong existing enterprise market-share, and a proven reputation derived from serving virtually every top tier global OEM,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “This combination of ability and reach means HGST is well positioned in the enterprise storage space. It is a market where, despite ever increasing demand, the likelihood is that only vendors that can offer extensive product portfolios – such as Hitachi – are likely to prosper over the long-term.”

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, innovative external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world’s most valued data. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives, Hitachi GST provides high-value storage for a broad range of market segments, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Personal Storage. Hitachi GST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hgst.com/.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2009 (ended March 31, 2010) consolidated revenues totaled 8,968 billion yen ($96.4 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.

1 IDC, Worldwide Solid State Drive 2010-2014 Forecast and Analysis, Doc.#223876, Jul 2010.

One GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). One PB is equal to 1,000 TB (one quadrillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting.

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