Hitachi and IBM extend interoperability agreement

Hitachi, its wholly owned subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and IBM have
announced a technology licensing agreement intended to extend the inter-

operability and compatibility of their respective storage systems, servers and
software. The agreement is intended to make it easier for customers to be able
to more easily install both HDS and IBM products in their environments.

The companies also announced plans for joint collaboration on product
interoperability testing to support Hitachi storage system compatibility with
IBM zSeries mainframe customer deployments. As part of the agreement, Hitachi
will license a portion of IBM's eServer zSeries enterprise storage related
interface technologies for use in Hitachi storage platforms as well as future
technologies.

IBM has licensed the FICON/ESCON attachment specification for its high-end
IBM TotalStorage DS8000 Series and IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server to
Hitachi. The license will help Hitachi be better positioned to support clients
who want benefits of IBM's Global and Metro Mirroring capabilities, z/OS
Global Mirror, FlashCopy, Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) and GDPS functions in an
environment that includes IBM TotalStorage products as well as enterprise
storage products marketed globally by HDS as the Hitachi Universal Storage
Platform Series, including its OEM and co-branded variants.

CYBERMEDIA NEWS