1 - Hitachi, HDS, HP, SUN

What have all four of the above companies got in common?

Well....... Hitachi Ltd is the, Tokyo Japan based, company that designs and builds the USPV. The designers and engineers etc (the “factory”) live and work for Hitachi Ltd. The factory name for the USP V is the RAID600. When all is said and done, it is a Hitachi box. At the time of writing, HDS, HP and Sun Microsystems all sell the RAID600, only under their own marketing names so called re-badging. They are often referred to as “vendors”.

* HDS sells it as the USP V
* HP sells it as the HP StorageWorks XP24000
* Sun Microsystems sell it as the Sun StoreageTek 9990V

Aside from each of the above vendors having different front doors on the unit, the USP V, XP24000 and 9990V are the same thing – the Hitachi RAID6000. At a very high level the agreements between the different companies is as follows –
HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd and has very close ties with Hitachi Ltd. They are a storage centric company and act much like a sales and marketing department for the Hitachi storage business.
HP (Hewlett Packard) has an extensive OEM agreement with Hitachi Ltd. Sun Microsystems is a reseller for HDS.
There may also be occasional differences in supported configurations between the vendors, for example one might support a wider range if disk drives that the others one may announce support for SSD before the others. Any more detail is outside of the scope of this document.