Hitachi Data Systems Introduces Industry’s First Heterogeneous Replication Solution for VMware Environments

Customers Gain Data Protection Benefits and Reduced Risk Exposure to Improve Operational Resilience

Kuala Lumpur, September 18, 2008 -- As a cornerstone of a strategic initiative to enhance the disaster recovery benefits for VMware customers around the globe, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced it is first to achieve compatibility with VMware Site Recovery Manager, supporting heterogeneous virtualised storage. Following comprehensive qualification testing in collaboration with VMware, Hitachi is now offering customers the Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter, a software plug-in, that is designed to offer organisations continuous, real-time local and remote replication and automatic failover capabilities to ensure resilient data protection, high availability and disaster recovery for VMware environments.

As the adoption of server virtualisation continues to accelerate, organisations are looking to reduce the risk, cost and complexities associated with applying traditional disaster recovery methods to virtualised workloads, and maximise the safeguard of application data stored on sprawled virtual machines across the datacentre. To address these pressing customer challenges, the Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter facilitates the linkage between Hitachi’s market-leading array-based replication technologies, including Hitachi Universal Replicator, Hitachi TrueCopy® Synchronous, and Hitachi ShadowImage® in-system replication software, and VMware Site Recovery Manager. Coupled together, these software solutions provide industry-leading operational resilience, robust data protection, recovery management and replication capabilities optimised for VMware infrastructure.

“The joint Hitachi Data Systems and VMware solution offers a best-in-class solution for customers looking to implement an end-to-end, robust business continuity strategy for their virtual infrastructures and obtain improved Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO),” said Johnson Khoo, Managing Director, Hitachi Data Systems Sdn Bhd. “We look forward to our continued strategic partnership with VMware to open up new market opportunities for our business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that benefit VMware customers.”

Hitachi Data Systems has a long proven track record of providing customers a comprehensive portfolio of business continuity products, services and solutions that maintain required service levels for essential business functions and processes, ensure data availability and resilience, and aid in the prevention and mitigation of interruptions caused by planned or unplanned events. With integration support for VMware Site Recovery Manager, customers gain the ability to automate and test disaster recovery capabilities to ensure automated fail-over of their infrastructure, leveraging the advanced functionality of Hitachi Data Systems’ market-leading array-based replication solutions.

“VMware Site Recovery Manager leverages Hitachi enterprise replication technologies to deliver a robust disaster recovery solution,” said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances at VMware. “Combining VMware’s host-side virtual machine intelligence and Hitachi Data Systems’ system-based replication delivers uniquely flexible and capable offerings, ensuring that mutual customers can deploy robust disaster recovery capabilities for VMware environments that provide a high quality of service and support.”

VMware Site Recovery Manager is complementary to Hitachi Data Systems’ services-oriented data protection and recovery solutions. Leveraging a common, integrated storage management platform, customers can improve both the utilisation and business continuity of their most critical business applications, reduce risks, and improve the resilience of both servers and storage assets.

The Hitachi Data Storage Replication Adapter is immediately available to Hitachi Data Systems and VMware customers. For more information, please visit http://www.vmware.com/products/srm/.