IBM's joint venture with Hitachi

[rtichnor]

On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)
announced a preliminary joint venture agreement that includes
the sale of IBM's hard disk drive (HDD) business to HDS and the
collaboration to accelerate the development and delivery of next
generation storage management technology.

What does this mean to you and how could it affect your business
infrastructure?

Champion views this announcement as a good business decision
for both organizations with customers benefiting from its
results as this venture is expected to provide customers with
improved:

· Storage utilization for reduced TCO and ease of system(s)
management
· Interoperability and industry standards for storage networks
and storage systems
· Advanced functionality
· Better price and performance from new technology offerings

This announcement emphasizes IBM's and HDS's commitment to
further developing open standards so that customer's have
more options. By jointly developing a single approach (industry
standard) for storage virtualization, companies will reap the
rewards with improved storage manageability and lower cost of
ownership.

According to IBM, this announcement "is a testament to our
leadership in storage technology innovation, our commitment to
interoperability, and our insight into customer's business issues.
It firmly demonstrates our willingness to take the bold steps
necessary to address those issues".

To read the IBM announcement, please visit:

http://www-916.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/4B33EA877A332CA585256B9D00761267

 

[chiph]

A friend speculated that IBM spun off it's hard drive division because they're getting ready to introduce a holographic drive.

Of course, it could be for ordinary business reasons, too.


Chip H.

 

[bjverzal]

I don't know if this announcement has anything to do with the pending litigation between HDS and EMC, but HDS partnering with IBM could hurt EMC's marketshare.

Bill.