BANGALORE, INDIA: Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. announced the successful completion of compatibility and interoperability testing for the IBM System z10 Enterprise Class server, the IBM next-generation mainframe which IBM announced earlier this year.

The successful interoperability tests demonstrate how the combination of Hitachi's enterprise-class storage systems with IBM's next-generation mainframe can deliver the performance, reliability and availability for the most demanding applications. In addition, the testing completion results in a greater degree of compatibility and interoperability and makes it easier for customers to install both Hitachi Data Systems and IBM products in their environments.

Hitachi Data Systems continues to deliver virtualization solutions for mainframe storage environments, effectively enabling customers to store non-critical mainframe data on low-cost SATA systems. Hitachi's approach allows enterprises to centrally deliver and manage storage services such as data migration and replication, as opposed to utiliSing multiple isolated islands of storage to attempt to perform similar functions.

John Mansfield, senior vice president, Global Solutions Strategy and Development, Hitachi Data Systems, said: "Mainframe remains the mission-critical environment for many businesses today and because of this, the mainframe systems must meet the satisfaction of high reliability and availabilit. Hitachi has a deep history in supporting mainframe environments and has seen increased customer satisfaction since agreeing to conduct interoperability testing. Meeting the business-critical data storage needs of our mainframe customers around the globe is priority number one. In addition, we offer them opportunities to further consolidate and reduce the number of disparate storage platforms they must manage."

The successful testing was conducted for Hitachi's support of Enterprise System Connection  (ESCON), Fiber Connection (FICON) and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) connectivity for select configurations of IBM System z10 Enterprise Class (z10 EC), z9 Enterprise Class (z9 EC), zSeries 800, 900 and 990 systems running operating systems including z/OS 1.9, z/VM 5.3, z/VSE4.1 and Linux on System z Novell SUSE SLES 9 and SLES 10.