News

Oracle, Hitachi extend storage efforts

• By John K. Waters
• February 18, 2003

Oracle Corp. (http://www.oracle.com) and Hitachi Data Systems (http://www.hds.com) have agreed to intensify their long-standing alliance in an effort to jointly capture a bigger piece of the highly competitive enterprise storage market through a combination of technology development, improved services and support, and accelerated sales and marketing efforts.

Hitachi and Oracle first joined forces in 2001 when the pair enlisted the help of Myriad Genetics Inc. (http://www.myriad.com) to jointly produce a map of human-protein structures for medical and pharmaceutical research. Currently, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based HDS division of Japanese server and software maker Hitachi coordinates closely with Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle to ensure that its storage systems are compatible with Oracle's data management software. The firms also jointly sell Hitachi DB Validator, a data integrity tool for Oracle database systems that can prevent corrupted data from reaching the storage disk system and alerts administrators to problems.

The new, closer collaboration has already produced a software library that enables administrators to more easily find and extract Oracle data files stored on Hitachi machines. Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle will be plugged into Oracle's file topology extraction software (Oracle File Mapping), making it possible to identify and retrieve information about Oracle data file locations visually within Hitachi Freedom Storage systems. Hitachi DB Discovery for Oracle is scheduled to be available in late February or early March, the companies said.

The two companies are also working together to integrate Oracle's Recovery Manager interface with the Hitachi ShadowImage replication feature of Hitachi's storage systems. Their goal is to make petabyte-class online backup and recovery operations easier and faster, representatives said.

Additionally, the companies have verified compatibility between Hitachi Freedom Storage systems and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. And they have completed validation testing of Hitachi's ShadowImage and Remote Mirroring backup system with Hitachi TrueCopy on Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 V Series and Thunder 9500 V Series systems.

Along with ongoing joint development of technology and continuing services support, the two companies will collaborate on increased marketing activities. Those activities will include a worldwide rollout of a joint sales effort, which is already under way in Japan. The two companies are involved in the SAN Solution Technology Center, a facility created to demonstrate the value and benefit of utilizing the companies' integrated products, they said in a statement. Oracle and Hitachi are expected to expand their Asian sales and marketing activities to include China.