HP Teams with Fujitsu, Hitachi and Seagate to Deliver Next Standard for Server and Storage Hard Drives.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today announced it has partnered with leading hard disk drive vendors Fujitsu, Hitachi and Seagate to accelerate adoption of the next generation of hard drive technology for servers and storage.

The new small form factor (SFF) 2.5-inch, 10K RPM hard drive, developed by the partners and first unveiled by HP on March 14, is designed to deliver increased performance, improved server/storage density, greater thermal efficiency and lower total cost of ownership for enterprise computing. HP also plans to increase shipments of 3.5-inch, 15K RPM drives for server and storage applications requiring the highest levels of system performance.

HP will be the first server and storage vendor to offer the industry-standard SFF hard drive broadly across a portfolio when it soon deploys the drive across the HP ProLiant server family. HP is the leading enterprise hard drive vendor, shipping more than 1 million hard drives per quarter.

"HP is proud to have all the leaders in hard drive disk technology closely aligned with our strategy, helping to deliver innovations to customers that will improve the performance of their IT infrastructures," said Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networks and Infrastructure, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "By leading the adoption of the new form factor, HP is helping customers reduce costs and simplify change management of their server storage investments."

SFF drives will enable greater flexibility in server usage models. For example, the HP ProLiant DL360 server outfitted with the new drives and using HP's RAID 6 technology can now be tasked to more performance-oriented and mission-critical applications.

Innovating on standards to increase performance while adding value

HP and the hard drive vendors will standardize HP server and entry-level HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array offerings on the new 2.5-inch, 10K RPM and 3.5-inch, 15K RPM models, leaving behind the older and lesser-performing 3.5-inch, 10K RPM drives.

Both new models feature Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces, offering customers improved performance, reliability and scalability while delivering less power consumption and greater configuration flexibility compared to the parallel connections that most architectures have today. The 15K performance increase will enable IT managers to meet their data throughput requirements with smaller, more densely packed storage systems.

The new 3.5-inch, 15K RPM SAS models offer up to 147 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity and are best suited for use in applications where balance between capacity and throughput is the primary requirement, such as in decision support and in shared external storage.

The new 2.5-inch, 10K RPM SAS models offer more drive spindles per server at the popular volume capacities of 36 GB and 73 GB. They are best suited for performance-intensive applications such as online transaction processing.

The 2.5-inch, 10K hard drive is expected to be available in HP ProLiant servers in mid-2005. Implementation into HP BladeSystem, HP Integrity and HP StorageWorks portfolios will continue throughout 2006. HP expects to deliver the 2.5-inch, 15K hard drives in 2006.

Leading hard drive disk vendors support new drive architecture

"Throughout our long relationship, Fujitsu and HP have worked closely together to develop new technologies to benefit the performance of our mutual customers' infrastructures," said Hironobu Nishikori, senior vice president, Storage Products Group, Fujitsu. "Our work towards serial technologies and small form factor hard drives is no different. What Fujitsu most admires about HP's dedication to this latest technology transition is how immediately pervasive it is throughout their portfolio. This move allows customers to immediately capitalize on the benefits of serial technology and small form factor by having a rich mix of servers and direct attach storage solutions to choose from. Fujitsu's SAS SFF will offer the ultimate in density and performance computing."

"Hitachi and HP share an innovative spirit and dedication to helping enterprise customers meet their business objectives," said Doug Pickford, director, Product Strategy and Planning, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "The move to serial interfaces and higher performance enterprise drives is a critical step toward helping customers maximize the value they receive from their technology investments. Hitachi's forthcoming 15K SAS drives will not only offer increased performance, but customer choice and flexibility as well."

"Behind this announcement are several years of hard work and close collaboration between Seagate and HP, developing the new generation of small form factor enterprise storage technologies," said Brian Dexheimer, executive vice president, Global Sales and Marketing, Seagate. "These 2.5-inch enterprise-class drives that Seagate was first to ship to the industry are solutions targeted at solving some very real IT management issues. This includes the need to consolidate and optimize storage where information demands are growing faster than the physical capacity of data centers. HP's positioning of small form factor 2.5-inch enterprise, 15K-rpm 3.5-inch and SAS as emerging mainstream enterprise choices is closely aligned with the requirements of the growing IT industry."

More information on HP's server and storage technology is available at www.hp.com/go/serial and www.hp.com/servers/networking.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $81.8 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.

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