Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT) and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced it has signed a global partnership with Data Íslandia to offer archival data management services—enabling multinational organisations to address the growing management, compliance and environmental burden of exploding data volumes.

Data Íslandia has established facilities in Iceland with 100% green energy to offer international archival services for sensitive digital information with an emphasis on scalability, security and privacy. Using technology from Hitachi, Data Íslandia manages archived data for optimal compliance, risk containment, governance and operational advantage. The facilities are powered completely by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, making Data Íslandia’s services the greenest in the world.

“Organisations are focused on making their data centres more efficient, but virtualising six-month old information, which is effectively digital toxic waste, is a very poor use of resources. Instead, they should be looking to completely remove this data from the corporate network,“ said Sol Squire, Executive Member of the Board of Directors and CBDO for Data Íslandia. “We offer an ideal solution, with our geographic, regulatory and environmental advantages combining to offer very stable long-term rates on archival storage.”

Analysts estimate that up to 70% of data stored by organisations is more than six months old. Much of this data must be retained for compliance purposes but it is generally stored inefficiently, offers very little business value stored on tape, and takes up a great proportion of the available power, space and management resources. By removing archived data from the corporate network and cost-effectively storing it on disk, organisations benefit from reduced power consumption and cooling, increased space, better compliance with corporate regulations and far better use of resources.

“Our services are exceptionally scalable and cost-effective with an operational stability that is ideal for decades-long retention policies. Hitachi’s technology advances for the high-volume enterprise market, along with its strategic vision and anticipation of future legal and governance imperatives, make it the ideal technology partner,” said Squire.

Data Íslandia’s facilities benefit from Iceland’s lower real estate, telecommunications and energy costs. These reduced operational costs combined with Hitachi’s archiving technology means that Data Íslandia can offer disk-based archiving as a cost-effective alternative to tape. The benefit of this is that customers can access their archived data via a high-speed connection and use it for business intelligence, fraud prevention and other information management activities.

After assessing other solutions available on the market, Data Íslandia selected Hitachi because its solutions were the most scalable, flexible and latency resilient. Hitachi’s Services Oriented Storage Solutions strategy and its focus on software and management rather than hardware was consistent with Data Íslandia’s aim of providing decades-long archival services to customers without locking them into proprietary technologies that may quickly become outdated or superceded, effectively rendering their data useless.

Data Íslandia will use the Hitachi Content Archive Platform as the core digital indexing and archival platform, and will utilise Hitachi’s flagship storage system, the Universal Storage Platform™ V, for the storage of the archived data. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform offers numerous benefits including native content archiving, sophisticated policies data lifecycle management and compliance, petabyte scalability and the ability to migrate seamlessly across generations of storage technologies using the virtualisation capabilities of the USP V.

“Organisations are fast running out of room in their data centres due to the explosive growth of data volumes. Compounding this is the fact that stricter corporate governance controls and new regulations are creating a data management nightmare,” said Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. “Data Íslandia has created an elegant solution to many of the most critical challenges facing businesses today, allowing them to not only alleviate their own data centre burdens but to in fact make far better use of valuable business data. They also contribute positively to the environment by making use of the world’s most environmentally friendly data archival service.”

In addition to providing data archival services, Data Íslandia and Hitachi also help customers develop responsive data policies that meet evolving regulatory and risk management pressures. Coupling that policy suite with appropriate cost-effective technologies and processes means that organisations can harmonise the effects of decades of inconsistent legacy management, reducing risk and providing a positive return on investment.

About Data Íslandia

Data Íslandia provides international archival services for sensitive digital information under elevated security and enhanced privacy. We are located in Iceland, the world's most advanced IT society. With over 53 years of digital assets management, we are exceptional in our history of meeting the long-term needs of complex corporations and governments. For more information visit http://www.dataislandia.com.

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 / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 384,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2006 (ended March 31, 2007) consolidated revenues totalled 10,247 billion yen ($86.8 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.

© 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.