Hitachi Offers Channel Delivered Services

The bundles will be offered in conjunction with HDS' Global Solution Services arm, said Ken Beaudry, the unit's senior vice president and general manager. The offerings include product-based services tied to hardware products; storage solution services, including consulting-led services related to SANs and disaster recovery; and industry solutions focusing on unstructured data content management in verticals such as financial services, rich media, health care, government and life sciences, he said.

Global Solution Services aims to work with solution providers that want to resell the organization's services, become fully certified to sell and deliver the services, or sell and co-deliver the services with Global Solution Services, Beaudry said.

The services include enablement and implementation of Hitachi Shadow-

Image data replication and mirroring software; implementation of Hitachi TrueCopy local data replication and mirroring software; enablement and implementation of Hitachi HiCommand Tuning Manager and Device Manager; open systems and mainframe implementation of Hitachi Data Migration Services; Hitachi SplitSecond rapid recovery for Microsoft Exchange; and Hitachi Data Consolidation Service, according to HDS, Santa Clara, Calif. HDS TrueNorth channel program members are slated to have access to the services starting next month.

John Murphy, executive vice president of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based Hitachi solution provider, said HDS must offer such services if it wants the channel to grow its business and expertise. "I'm not looking for full integration services like those from IBM Global Services," Murphy said. "But if you want me to work closer with HDS, you better get those services out there and not compete with me. I want to make sure the people we have here who work with Hitachi get rewarded."

New offerings not yet available to the channel are data life-cycle management solutions for unstructured content, which are expected to be offered via a global development and distribution relationship HDS formed with Ixos Software, an independent enterprise content management vendor.

The first solution, Message Archive for Compliance, will let companies retain and archive e-mail and instant messages that can't be altered for a fixed time period specified by financial regulations. Stored

e-mails and messages are indexed and searchable for audit purposes, said Erek Gascon, senior director of industry solutions at HDS.

The second solution, Message Archive for E-Mail, will remove the size limits from user e-mail boxes, making it easier to establish archival rules for migrating messages to secondary storage while preserving the client interface, HDS executives said.

HDS also is working with AppIQ to deliver channel partners a co-branded storage management application. The software, based on AppIQ's StorageAuthority Suite, stands to bring improved SAN management, storage resource management and heterogeneous provisioning solutions to HDS' software portfolio, HDS executives said.