Hitachi, Ltd. and its wholly owned subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems today announced successful completion of compatibility and interoperability testing of Hitachi storage supporting IBM Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) solutions versions 3.2 and 3.3.

“A significant number of Hitachi storage customers—in the financial services, telecommunications and travel industries, among other key sectors—rely on mainframe systems to run mission-critical applications,” said Jack Domme, executive vice president, Global Solutions Strategy and Development, Hitachi Data Systems. “The successful completion of the interoperability and compatibility testing of Hitachi’s revolutionary storage systems with IBM’s GDPS demonstrates Hitachi’s commitment to this strategic segment of its storage business. As a result, users can be confident when they consider Hitachi in their data center purchasing decisions.”

Hitachi has seen increased customer satisfaction and sales momentum across the globe since agreeing in May 2005 to begin product interoperability testing to validate Hitachi storage system compatibility with IBM zSeries mainframes. The interoperability tests were conducted with the Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, Hitachi TagmaStore Network Storage Controller, Hitachi SANRISE Universal Storage Platform and Hitachi SANRISE Network Storage Controller, all of which are enterprise storage products marketed globally by Hitachi, Ltd., and Hitachi Data Systems.

IBM GDPS helps automate recovery procedures for planned and unplanned outages to provide near-continuous availability and disaster recovery capability. The companies successfully tested Hitachi storage support of GDPS version 3.2 and 3.3 using Enterprise System Connection (ESCON), Fiber Connection (FICON) and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) connectivity – for select configurations of IBM eServer zSeries 800, 900 and 990 systems; System z9; and IBM 9672 G5 and G6 – running z/OS 1.6 and z/OS 1.7.

Leveraging GDPS/Peer to Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) HyperSwap Manager enables synchronous mirroring up to distances of 100 km. Hitachi and IBM successfully tested GDPS/PPRC-based functions including:

• Planned HyperSwap
• Unplanned HyperSwap
• HyperSwap Failover/Failback
• Unplanned HyperSwap IOS Timing trigger
• FlashCopy

Leveraging GDPS/Peer to Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) enables synchronous mirroring up to distances of 100 km. Hitachi and IBM successfully tested GDPS/PPRC-based functions including:

• Planned HyperSwap
• Unplanned HyperSwap
• HyperSwap Failover/Failback
• Unplanned HyperSwap IOS Timing trigger
• Enhanced Recovery
• FlashCopy

GDPS/Extended Remote Copy (XRC) enables asynchronous replication over unlimited distances. Hitachi and IBM successfully tested the GDPS/XRC-based FlashCopy function.