Hitachi, Oracle deliver worldwide integrated solutions for data storage

Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems, together with Oracle Corporation and Oracle Corp Japan, have announced expanded collaboration in three key business areas: technology, services and support, and sales and marketing.

"Following its TrueNorth vision, Hitachi has been strengthening its collaboration with leading software and hardware vendors in order to provide improved solutions and satisfy customers' needs," explains Fanie van Rensburg, MD of local HDS distributor, Shoden Data Systems.

"By enhancing our relationship with Oracle, we enable our joint customers to enjoy the maximum business benefits of tighter integration between our products and higher levels of services and support worldwide," adds Dave Roberson, president and COO, Hitachi Data Systems.

"Data storage solutions have become more complex and our customers want infrastructures that are simpler, faster and easier to manage. We believe Hitachi tells a compelling global story; continuing to work with Hitachi is important to Oracle to help ensure we meet the growing needs of our joint customers," states Doug Kennedy, VP, Platform Alliances, System Platforms Division, Oracle.

Hitachi and Oracle plan to continue working closely together on the development of a number of technologies that drive tighter product integration and enhanced customer services. The vendors have worked together to develop the Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle.

This software library is plugged into Oracle File Mapping, Oracle's file topology extraction functionality, enabling database administrators to visually identify and extract information about Oracle datafile locations within Hitachi Freedom Storage systems. The Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle is scheduled to be available from Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems worldwide in February 2003.

As a part of Oracle's Backup Solution Program, Hitachi and Oracle plan to develop other solution technologies, which will enable integration between Oracle's Recovery Manager interface and the Hitachi ShadowImage replication function of Hitachi Freedom Storage systems, reducing the complexity of time required for petabyte class online backup and recovery operations.

In order to provide seamless support services for mutual customers worldwide, Hitachi and Oracle have agreed to join forces to enhance their support services. By co-operatively providing services for customers, the vendors aim to shorten response time, decrease downtime, increase manageability and lower costs.

This builds on technologies such as Hitachi "DB Validator", which is a data integrity technology for Oracle Database systems that prevents corrupted data from reaching the networked storage disk system and alerts both database and storage system administrators of a potential issue.

Hitachi and Oracle also plan to explore providing joint proactive service solutions, which are collaborative services for both database and storage environments, focused on helping joint customers improve system availability and performance, while reducing total cost of ownership.

Hitachi and Oracle have conducted joint sales and marketing activities in Japan based on leveraging the "SAN Solution Technology Centre" - a centre established by both companies for the purpose of developing and demonstrating the value and benefit of utilising their integrated solutions when deploying mission-critical systems.

The companies plan to expand this sales and marketing collaboration globally, beginning with China. The companies also plan to introduce a joint reference model, which would enable both Hitachi and Oracle to develop and provide integrated storage solutions to their customers.