Hitachi Data Systems, one of the leading global players in the enterprise storage segment, recently announced its TrueNorth Solutions Alliance program. The company is also making a foray in the mid-range storage space. Its mid-range shipment will grow approximately 31 percent sequentially to roughly 2,100 TB, representing 12 percent of the estimated total TB shipped for the second half of FY2003. Patrick Lim, vice-president and general manger (Asia South), Hitachi Data Systems, talks about the Alliance program and the need to shift to the mid-range space. Excerpts…

What does Hitachi Data Systems plans to achieve with the TrueNorth Solutions Alliance?
The TrueNorth Solutions Alliance launched in India in December 2002 (globally in May 2002) is basically a new partnering initiative based on a collaborative business model. It is aimed at increasing our bouquet of offerings by means of bringing best-of-breed products through industry alliances. The alliance consists of four programs—TrueNorth Solutions Partner Program (for channel partners), TrueNorth Global Solutions Partners Program (for global SIs), TrueNorth Technology Partners Program (for SAN solutions partners and ISVs), and TrueNorth Developer Partners Program (for storage application developers). It also focuses on the training and certification aspect of all partners.

What was the need for forming such an alliance?
It came from repeated demands from our clients who wanted us to provide those parts of the entire network solutions that we were not offering. For example, we were traditionally in the SAN space, while many of our customers demanded that they also required NAS solutions for which they had to go to multiple vendors. Now as part of our alliance program, we are collaborating with Network Appliance for enterprise NAS gateway and storage management solutions. There was also a worldwide trend of moving towards open standards. For example, we were already providing Sun and HP boxes as their partner, but now under the new program, all our channel and solution partners will provide the clients support for Sun and HP boxes.

What are the dynamics in India?
At present, we have three channel partners in India, namely Apara, Tata Infotech, and Lanbit. Under this program, we will be ramping up the operations to have a multi-tiered scheme of 15 partners. Our customers include most of the leading names in the telecom, banking, and software development space in India. We expect to grow by 12 percent in FY 2003, reaching $2.33 million from $2.07 million last year.

How do you intend to tap the mid-range storage market?
In the high-end RAID market, we are currently almost tied up with EMC for leadership. Our new solutions look to increase penetration in growing verticals such as retail, life sciences, health care, and rich media. The new high-end 9570V array can scale to 32.7 TB. Its internal bandwidth of 4.2 Gbps is much greater than the competing offerings. The 9500V series also supports virtual storage ports (VSPs) and host storage domains (HSDs), which promise to bring virtualization features from the high-end lightning to the midrange/distributed environment. This would raise the competitive bar significantly.

Mumbai Bureau