Enterprise Storage Group Confirms Hitachi Lightning 9980V's Superiority for Massive Storage Consolidation.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 15, 2004

-- ESG Lab research finds customers enjoy significant benefits,

plus improvements in application availability and performance

over comparative storage systems

-- Cites Hitachi's 'Best in Class' Hi-Star architecture, Host

Storage Domains, Virtual Storage Ports, and Priority Access as

key enablers of massive consolidation

Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) and the leader in enterprise storage technology and marketshare, today announced that a new in-depth research report from Enterprise Storage Group Lab identifies the Hitachi Lightning 9980V(TM) storage system as the industry's leading storage consolidation platform. The report links many unique features of the Lightning 9980V to real customer value, including simplified management and reduced costs, while easily meeting service levels.

In the report, titled "Hitachi Lightning 9980V: Enterprise Storage Consolidation Analysis," ESG Lab noted that it is "extremely impressed with Hitachi's Host Storage Domains, Virtual Storage Ports, and Priority Access software, which contribute to greater storage consolidation above and beyond the competition."

"Through our own technical analysis, and in-depth interviews with customers, we found that the Lightning 9980V is an excellent storage consolidation solution," said Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst for ESG Lab. "Based on the Lightning's performance, reliability, scalability, capacity, ease of management, and unique and powerful functionality, we recommend the 9980V to anyone considering a storage consolidation project."

As part of its research efforts, ESG Lab found that customers replaced as many as eight competitive systems with one Lightning 9980V system. Even so, customers reported that "the Lightning 9980V was extremely reliable and was never a cause for unplanned downtime...In many cases the customers installed the Lightning 9980V to solve performance problems they had encountered with other vendor's storage systems."

ESG Lab research indicated that "the advanced Hitachi Hi-Star(TM) crossbar switch architecture supports dramatically more concurrent operations than other storage products. The Hi-Star backplane can support up to 96 concurrent operations, which is ideal for mixed workloads." This architecture enables the Lightning 9980V to scale to 150TB of raw capacity, the highest in the industry, another key capability for massive consolidation.

"The unique meta-cache of the Lightning 9900 V Series delivers a number of important benefits to users. For example, configuration information is dynamic in contrast to static configurations that require periodic bin file changes. This eliminates virtually all of the causes for scheduled downtimes, a very important consideration in any consolidation and high availability strategy."

ESG spoke with several Hitachi Data Systems customers who were able to describe the tangible benefits of consolidating their storage with Lightning 9980V enterprise storage systems. One, a Fortune 50 bank, was able to reduce from eight to one the number of storage systems required to support 80,000 Microsoft Exchange users.

Another, a Fortune 50 insurance company, had been using 18 storage systems from various vendors to support data warehousing and other applications. They were able to consolidate all applications onto eight Lightning 9980V storage systems and saw significant improvement in application performance.

Scott Genereux, Vice President, Global Marketing, Business Development, and Channels, Hitachi Data Systems, commented, "We, and more importantly, our customers have long known that the Lightning 9980V is best-in-class for enterprise storage consolidation. Having this validated by ESG further solidifies our position as the leader in high-end enterprise storage."

The complete ESG Lab report "Hitachi Lightning 9980V: Enterprise Storage Consolidation Analysis" is available at: http://www.hds.com/esg_report_031504.pdf.

About Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems leverages global R&D resources to develop storage solutions built on industry-leading technology with the performance, availability and scalability to maximize customers' ROI and minimize their risk. By focusing on the customer's perspective as we apply the best hardware, software, and services from Hitachi and our partners, we uniquely satisfy our customers' business needs.

With 2,700 employees, Hitachi Data Systems conducts business through direct and indirect channels in the public, government and private sectors in over 170 countries. Its customers include more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company, with approximately 340,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2002 (ended March 31, 2003) consolidated sales totaled 8,191.7 billion yen ($68.3 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors, including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit www.hitachi.com.

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