Hitachi and HP offer industry first high-performance 300 gigabyte drives for server and storage solutions.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) and HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) has announced availability of the industry's first storage and server solutions offering high-performance 300 gigabyte (GB) Fibre Channel and SCSI disk drive capacity. HP will offer the Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 Fibre Channel drive in the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) and the Ultrastar 10K300 SCSI drive in industry-standard HP ProLiant servers and the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family. The Ultrastar 10K300 offers a valuable combination of capacity, reliability and ease of integration.

"HP and Hitachi share an innovative spirit and customer-focused approach to doing business that underpins our ongoing relationship and enables us to deliver these types of breakthrough product offerings," said Fumio Kugiya, general manager, Server Business Unit, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "Hitachi is pleased to be supporting HP in this effort, and we look forward to continuing to deliver best-in-class products to our shared customers."

With the new 300 GB Fibre Channel drives, HP doubles the high-performance data storage capability of the midrange StorageWorks EVA to a raw capacity of 70 terabytes. With the massively expanded capacity of the HP StorageWorks EVA family, customers can continue to benefit from the system's ease-of-management as more information is digitized and retained.

"We are pleased that our close work with Hitachi has resulted in HP being first-to-market with a range of solutions that address our customers' storage and server requirements," said Kyle Fitze, director of marketing, Online Storage Division, Network Storage Solutions, HP. "HP selected Hitachi because of their reputation for quality and astounding storage capacity, both of which are key design attributes for our storage and servers."

The Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300 is built on a proven drive design with demonstrated enterprise class reliability and product quality. The new 3.5-inch drives satisfy the requirements of mission-critical storage applications such as online transaction processing, data analysis and media streaming. The Ultrastar 10K300 features capacities of 73, 147 and 300GB and a 10,000 RPM rotational speed.

Featuring unique virtualization and automation capabilities, the HP StorageWorks EVA family of products is simple to manage yet doesn't compromise performance. In fact, it is currently the Storage Performance Council SPC-1 dual-controller performance leader. When configured with the new Hitachi Ultrastar 10K300, users should be able to more than double their high-performance storage capacity using the same amount of floor space, while lowering their cost per megabyte.

The EVA family is designed for environments where there is a need for improved storage utilization and scalability, consistently high transaction input/output and megabyte data rate performance, seamless capacity expansion, instantaneous replication and simplified storage administration.