History 2002: 60 Hitachi Freedom 9900s per Month for Europe

All Freedom Lightning 9900 units destined for Europe are assembled by Hitachi in a plant in Olivet, France, near the city of Orleans in the Loire Valley region.

These machines, you will recall, have enjoyed a certain success in competing with EMC’s Symmetrix and IBM’s Shark systems in the high-end SAN market. They are sold not only by HDS and its distributors, but also by Sun and HP, as the result of OEM accords.

In all, 3 different production centers chum out the devices: one in Odawara, Japan, another in Santa Clara, CA and the third at Olivet.

The latter factory, operating under the name Hitachi Computer Products (Europe) France, or HICEF, reports to the Japanese storage and Retrieval Systems division, which in turn is part of Hitachi Ltd.’s Computers Group.

It was founded in 1991, with an investment of €40 million, on a picturesque campus of 164 acres, with 188,000 square feet of buildings where 250 people work.

Initially, the plant manufactured IBM compatible disk drives, then RAID storage subsystems for mainframes, before giving way this year to the assembly of 9900s for all of Europe, an activity that accounts for 95% of the French plant sales.

Current production is 60 controllers and 110 disk boxes per month. Not only is HICEF responsible for the complete assembly of 9900 units, but it also handles the surface mounting of all PCBs. The disk drives, however, come from Hitachi’s plant in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, the French facility, which is ISO 9001 certified, looks to European subcontractors for 60% of its total supplies (excluding HDDs).

For each machine, a week of tests are performed before the units are sent to another Hitachi center in the Netherlands, which personalizes each machine before shipping to the end user.

HICEF’ssles, which for the 9900 correspond to the sale cost to HDS, attained €660 million in 2000, up 60% over the previous year.

Currently, 60% of the units are sold directly by HDS’ channel, compared to 40% by its 2 OEMs, with the goal of quickly reaching a balanced 50%.

A more ambitious goal set by HDS is to become the ≠2 provider of high-end storage, with the placement of 18PB of storage (+85% annually), or WW sales of $2.1 billion (only +4% this time, which means prices will drop!) for the fiscal year ending March 2002, and to grow to $3 billion the following year, with increased development of software and solutions.

One unusual aspect to this tranquil plant on the banks of the Loire: its president, Tadamitsu Kurokawa offers aikido classes to employees every Thursday evening, on a large tatami within the factory.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 168 on January 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.