HDS, Oracle Pad Storage Partnership

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Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)
and Oracle
Wednesday pledged to pad their long-standing
storage-oriented relationship with new endeavors in technology, services and
support, as well as sales and marketing, to lure enterprise customers.

Financial terms of the bolstered alliance were not made public. HDS, a
Hitachi division who works closely with Oracle to make sure that its Hitachi
storage systems are integrated with Oracle information management software,
said the two firms have embarked on a “tighter relationship’ addressing
those needs.

Such partnerships are as common in the storage sector as they are non-exclusive as major systems vendors jockey for market position. Dell and EMC enjoy a similar relationship.

On the technology side, Santa Clara, Calif.’s HDS and Redwood Shores,
Calif.’s Oracle have created the Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle, a software
library plugged into Oracle File Mapping, Oracle’s file topology extraction
software, to help database administrators visually identify and grab
information about Oracle data file locations within Hitachi Freedom Storage
systems. Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle is scheduled to be available later
this month.

The concerns will also work to provide integration between Oracle’s Recovery
Manager interface and the Hitachi ShadowImage replication function of
Hitachi Freedom Storage systems to make petabyte-class online backup and
recovery operations easier and faster.

To bring their products even closer together, Hitachi and Oracle are working
to make sure their products work as compatibly as possible. The two
companies have verified compatibility between Hitachi Freedom Storage
systems and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. They have also successfully
completed the validation testing for the operation of Snapshot
(Split-Mirroring) with Hitachi ShadowImage and Remote Mirroring
functionality with Hitachi TrueCopy on Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning
9900 V Series and Thunder 9500 V Series systems.

On the services side, Hitachi and Oracle have agreed to enhance their
support services to better meet customers’ needs. The services side is
hardly novel for these two; the firms already provide Hitachi “DB
Validator,” a data integrity tool for Oracle Database systems that prevents
corrupted data from reaching the storage disk system and alerts
administrators to problems.

Lastly, Hitachi and Oracle Japan have conducted sales and marketing
activities in Japan to shill for the “SAN Solution Technology Center,” a
facility created to demonstrate the value and benefit of utilizing the
firms’ integrated products. The companies will expand this sales and
marketing venture in Japan worldwide, beginning with China.