In the face of increased compliance regulations and rising data protection requirements, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT) and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today introduced three new Virtual Tape Library (VTL) Appliances designed to answer these pressing customer challenges—the Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 500M, the Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 1000L, and the Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 1000E. This comprehensive portfolio of VTL appliances brings medium-sized businesses and enterprise customers the fastest and the most advanced disk-based data protection storage services available in the market today—eclipsing any other competitive offering in its class.

Organisations of all sizes are often challenged by long, inefficient and some times faulty backup operations due to the slow process of writing large amounts of data to tape. In addition, customers are faced with the expensive costs associated with keeping vast amounts of data available on their storage systems. Combining the market-leading ProtecTIER™ data de-duplication technology from Diligent Technologies and powerful Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) systems, the new Virtual Tape Library Appliances deliver the industry’s fastest inline data de-duplication, while also maintaining 100-percent data integrity. Furthermore, the Virtual Tape Library Appliances eliminate redundant data—reducing physical storage needs by up to 25 times or more—and integrate into existing IT environments seamlessly, thereby preserving customers’ storage infrastructure investments.

“Inline data de-duplication is a superior approach for industrial strength backup and recovery relative to post-processing architectures,” said David Floyer, Chief Technical Officer of ITCentrix, a CIO consultancy. “But the real story is that Hitachi’s ProtectTIER technology is far more scalable and ready to meet the coming explosion in data backup requirements than alternative hash-based inline approaches. For example, our research indicates that customers using Hitachi’s ProtectTIER to replace tape-based backup will achieve 31% greater savings than best of breed hash-based alternatives.”

"With the announcement of Hitachi Data Systems' new VTL appliances, customers now have a simplified way of optimising their existing storage environment and reducing their physical storage requirements many times over," said Scott Robinson, chief technology officer, Datalink, a leading information storage architect. "Datalink has a long history of successfully deploying and supporting Hitachi Data Systems and Diligent Technologies solutions, and this latest offering opens up new opportunities for us to provide our customers the performance, scalability, and reliability they expect in a cost-effective appliance package."

Commenting on today’s announcement, Simon Elisha, head solutions architect, ANZ, Hitachi Data Systems added, "Hitachi has a proven track record in successfully delivering powerful data de-duplication and data protection services to customers in large scale enterprise deployments. Today, we are making available these enterprise-grade storage services to medium-sized customers with new cost-effective VTL appliances that are easy to implement and easy to manage. We believe these appliances will meet our customers’ requirements for greater application availability, robust data protection, and long-term retention and protection of business-critical data assets.”

"Hitachi’s new VTL appliances will provide customers with new choices for a range of IT environments," said Russ Fellows, Senior Storage Analyst for Evaluator Group. "Combining the power efficiency of Hitachi AMS storage systems with Diligent's streaming data de-duplication capabilities and integrated management may be the answer to improving backup that IT departments have been searching for."

Specifically, Hitachi Data Systems today announced:

New VTL Appliance for Medium-Sized Customers For customers requiring a high-performance, high-availability, yet cost effective disk-based VTL solution, the Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 500M by Hitachi Data Systems delivers the fastest single-server data de-duplication performance and highest capacity to meet the requirements and budgets of medium-sized businesses. This VTL appliance can store more than 500 terabytes of backup data storage capacity, offering customers greater flexibility to accommodate their growing business environments, while also optimising existing storage assets. Supported by the cost-efficient and high-performance Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage System (AMS) Model 500, the Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 500M by Hitachi Data Systems offers customers an integrated set of advanced storage services that provides significant reliability and responsiveness improvements in the back-up, recovery and business continuity processes of medium-sized businesses.

New VTL Appliances for Enterprise Customers Designed to meet the demand for high-performance, availability and scalability of enterprise customers, the Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 1000E and 1000L by Hitachi Data Systems feature the Diligent ProtecTIER Enterprise data de-duplication software to deliver the industry’s fastest single server data de-duplication performance and handle the largest capacity of back-up data. The Virtual Tape Library Appliance Model 1000E offers up to 400MB/sec of throughput performance—more than 300-percent faster than competitor offerings—and is capable of managing more than 1 petabyte of back-up data. Taking advantage of the advanced multi-processing technologies of the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage, model AMS1000, these powerful VTL appliances can also better centrally manage data assets, while also significantly reducing backup time, speeding recovery and improving risk mitigation.

“Optimising performance, data resiliency and improved data recovery are all top of mind for Gartner customers and IT departments around the world. Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) allow users to benefit from the faster performance of disks while maintaining tape-based backup methodologies without making significant system changes. With tens of thousands of units shipped and hundreds of petabytes of capacity in the market, VTLs are a significant vehicle for delivering advanced functions and features,” said David Russell, research vice president, Gartner. “One of those advanced features, data de-duplication technology, is poised to transform the way data is protected, improving backup and recovery times and changing the economics of disk-based approaches. As a result, VTL appliances with advanced data de-duplication capabilities are increasingly important to companies as they work to improve their storage utilisation and maintain data protection and recovery capabilities while reducing overall costs.”

"This announcement provides further evidence of the value that our strategic partnership with Hitachi Data Systems can deliver to customers," said Doron Kempel, Chairman & CEO of Diligent Technologies. "By integrating our market-leading ProtecTIER with Hitachi's world-class hardware, services and support, Hitachi Data Systems is bringing to market elegant and easy-to-deploy data de-duplication solutions that deliver both dramatic improvements in data protection and radical cost reductions."

The Virtual Tape Library Appliances by Hitachi Data Systems will be available worldwide through a network of over 1,500 value-added resellers, channel partners, systems integrators and the Hitachi Data Systems direct sales force.

For more information, including technical specifications, visit: http://www.hds.com/products/storage-software/virtual-tape-library.html.

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 totaled 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.

© 2008, 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.