Hitachi Strategic Storage Announcement Quote Sheet.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Customers on the new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform[TM] V:

United Airlines: "The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V offers the market the first enterprise-class thin provisioning solution," said Gary Pilafas, managing director, Enterprise Architecture, United Airlines. "With the combination of Hitachi's controller-based virtualization and thin provisioning, organizations are positioned for improved storage economics by allowing for a lower total cost of storage ownership."

"Hitachi continues to lead the enterprise storage market through new innovations," said Gary Pilafas, managing director, Enterprise Architecture, United Airlines. "Hitachi's implementation of thin provisioning brings the first enterprise-class solution to market with extremely high levels of performance and scalability. The new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V will continue to change the face of storage economics by lowering enterprise total cost of storage ownership."

Leading Industry Analysts on Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V Software Innovations:

"Storage virtualization is the key technology that enables a large scale consolidation of heterogeneous storage environments," said John Webster, principal IT advisor, Illuminata. "In terms of scalability to the petabyte range combined with operational consolidation and depth of storage-based services deliverable to a wide range of applications and operating environments, the Hitachi USP V has no present equal."

"There hasn't been seamless integration of storage virtualization and thin provisioning. Users have struggled with this," said Tom Trainer, senior analyst, Evaluator Group. "The market is changing, and Hitachi has rearranged the competitive playing field by providing both heterogeneous virtualization and thin provisioning at an enterprise level. With this announcement, Hitachi continues to demonstrate its commitment to the Universal Storage Platform and its ability to deliver value to the user via hardware and software integration."

Leading Industry Analysts on Hitachi Green Solutions:

"Hitachi can look at performance environmental information in a distinctive way by virtue of its unique ability to separate the controller from the back-end disks; others look at these environmentals from within the controller-disk commixture," said Tom Trainer, senior analyst, Evaluator Group. "Additionally, Hitachi's universal storage controller engines can manage thousands of terabytes behind a single engine with literally hundreds of power-friendly processors but more capacity per processor than competitive offerings, thereby extending material power, cooling and space advantages to customers. The Hitachi USP V supports 247 petabytes -- with competitors supporting one petabyte, or fewer. From an overall power and cooling perspective, one can easily equate this to comparing snow cones to cappuccinos."

"ITCentrix's analysis of market leading high-end storage solutions shows that for I/O-intensive configurations of between 54 terabytes to 134 terabytes, competitive solutions consume 24-percent to 52-percent more budget for power, cooling and space over a five-year period than comparably configured Hitachi USP Vs using virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning," said Dave Vellante, president and CEO of ITCentrix.

Leading Industry Analysts on Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V Performance and Scalability Breakthroughs:

"The Hitachi USP V takes performance to another level," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "This is also innovation at its best -- improving the architecture of a storage system to raise its performance at nearly all levels -- in leaps. Performance is not discussed as often as it should be -- if your applications don't perform well -- then your business suffers."

"Hitachi continues to set the bar for enterprise-class controller-based heterogeneous storage virtualization supporting common storage services," said Carl Greiner, senior vice president, Infrastructure and Software, OVUM. "The announcement of the USP V begins to render any controller performance or scalability issues mute and virtualization-enabled Dynamic Provisioning allows storage utilizations to exceed 85-percent, delivering unique economies to storage infrastructures. This announcement most definitely takes storage virtualization to a new level."

"One of the most compelling aspects of the new Hitachi USP V is that it provides three dimensions of storage virtualization," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The first is its internal virtualization capability that includes thin provisioning, large logical storage pools, wide striping, virtual partitions, and quality-of-service. The second virtualization dimension of the USP V is its external storage virtualization software managing heterogeneous storage systems and its capabilities as a high-end platform that provides best-in-class performance, scalability and reliability. The third virtualization dimension is that you can take all of the considerable intelligence and functionality within the USP V and extend it to any class of storage you have in the data center. Hitachi provides all three dimensions within its flagship storage system -- driving innovation where it is needed and executing on a vision that provides real value to end-users."

"In May of 2006 our models showed that for large configurations, best-of-breed competitive storage solutions consumed 50-percent more budget dollars than the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform. One would expect such a sizable advantage to erode in twelve months but that's not the case," said David Floyer, chief technical officer and co-founder, ITCentrix, a leading CIO consultancy. "Our latest models show that for similarly configured systems, competitive offerings consume 60-percent more budget dollars than the new Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, demonstrating that Hitachi is actually increasing its total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage relative to the competition."

"While scoring a number of industry 'firsts,' the Hitachi USP V is the first self-contained, pre-integrated, Services Oriented Storage platform that scales to petabyte levels while maintaining a manageable and predictable operating environment over the lifecycle of the product," said John Webster, principal IT advisor, Illuminata. "The USP V also offers an opportunity to further consolidate disparate storage platforms and reduce the number of vendors IT users have to manage."

"Dealing with ever more complex and fast paced growth in information assets poses major challenges for today's data center executives as they must balance boost responsiveness, performance, and capacity while keeping a tight control on costs," said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems Research, IDC. "Solutions like Hitachi's new USP V, with its next generation of virtual storage controllers and advanced storage services, provides a foundation for 'super charging' the capabilities and usefulness of storage assets in the data center, regardless of type, cost, or functionality."

"These smart enhancements enable Hitachi to provide more cost-effective and predictive performance and scalability to customers," said Brian Garrett, technical director, Enterprise Strategy Group Lab. "ESG Lab tested the Hitachi USP V and confirmed that more processing power per port, control memory and back-end bandwidth than the previous generation USP provides predictable performance scalability across a wide variety of applications."

"Hitachi, with the new Hitachi USP V, raises the bar even higher," said Josh Krischer, founder, Josh Krischer & Associates, a leading storage consulting firm. "Hitachi is the only high-end storage vendor to introduce controller-based virtualization, multiple logical partitions, storage-agnostic array-based replication and is now the first with enterprise-class thin provisioning. All of these software innovations combined with continued impressive architectural enhancements and robust hardware entrench the USP V's position on the leading-edge of high-end storage subsystems."

"There is no doubt that Hitachi's Universal Storage Platform V is the highest performing solution in the marketplace today," added Dave Vellante, president and CEO of ITCentrix. "But there is much more to this story. Customers today face performance challenges in delivering high function storage services such as remote replication. This architecture enables the delivery of storage services, like Dynamic 'Thin' Provisioning, without performance constraints and eliminates the need to throw more controllers at the problem. In percentage terms, this translates into double digit reductions in total cost of ownership, and triple digit improvements in business benefit as measured in better responsiveness and reduced risk."

Leading Industry Analysts on Hitachi Services Oriented Storage Solutions:

"Beyond providing data migration, replication and storage aggregation, storage virtualization must enable common storage services so that dynamic business process requirements and their instantiated applications can use a common, managed heterogeneous storage infrastructure," said Carl Greiner, senior vice president, Infrastructure and Software, OVUM. "The elimination of unique storage solutions and management to address each storage requirement will maximize leverage and lead to a truly optimized storage infrastructure. The realized benefit of storage virtualization will be the enablement of a common, consolidated, leveraged, dynamic, and managed portfolio of heterogeneous storage services."

"The most interesting and compelling feature of Hitachi's strategy is that management metrics -- quality-of-service (QoS), service level objective/agreement (SLO/SLA), and recovery point objective (RPO) are applied across all services layers," said John Webster, principal IT advisor, Illuminata. "Seeing enterprise storage in the context of deliverable services is key to unlocking both the realizable and chargeable value of virtualized storage."

"IT managers can use capabilities like those included in Hitachi's Services Oriented Storage Solutions to change the interaction between IT departments and their business customers," said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems, IDC. "IT managers can shift the emphasis of their discussions from infrastructure impediments to the business services required to support rapid application deployment, greater resiliency and ongoing cost-of-use."

"IT must provide more transparency to the granularity of services being provided to the business and allow clients to see exactly what they're being charged for," said Dave Vellante, president and CEO of CIO consultancy ITCentrix. "Leading organizations are beginning to construct pay-as-you-go models that reflect the consumption of storage-related services versus some vague concept of chargeback. Hitachi's services oriented approach supports the idea that IT delivery and business lines can forge true partnerships based on value."

"Storage services delivered to the business today are not only costly, but inflexible, giving buyers little choice and limited visibility about use and value," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Universal Storage Platform V provides a highly scalable platform with a suite of functionality that is actually designed to enable better storage services delivery. In order for IT to provide a true service back to the business we need to create utility. In order to create utility we need to better leverage physical IT infrastructure. The Universal Storage Platform V does this, providing unique and compelling value to enable Services Oriented Storage Solutions."

About Hitachi Data Systems 

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation provides Services Oriented Storage Solutions that enable heterogeneous storage to be dynamically provisioned according to business needs and centrally managed via industry-leading Hitachi storage virtualization software. As an integral part of the Hitachi Storage Solutions Group, Hitachi Data Systems delivers storage infrastructure platforms, storage management software, and storage consulting services through direct and indirect channels in over 170 countries and regions. Its customers include nearly 60-percent of Fortune 100 companies. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.hds.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 356,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2005 (ended March 31, 2006) consolidated sales totaled 9,464 billion yen ($80.9 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 the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

(c) 2007, Hitachi is a registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Hitachi Data Systems is a registered trademark and service mark of Hitachi, Ltd. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, services marks, company names are properties of their respective owners.