Do not confuse Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) with sister company disk drive maker Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, even though both are subsidiaries of Japanese computing and electronics conglomerate Hitachi.

HDS is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and makes sophisticated storage disk array systems and software to manage these systems.

In July this year, the enterprise storage giant launched a virtual tape library aimed at businesses that use high-end open systems and mainframes. The technology enables tape libraries to be transferred to a virtual solution without changing current backup environment.

Playing the storage game differently from fellow competitors with the TagmaStore storage systems has also paid off for the storage maker. Data from U.S.-based research company Kaufman Brothers showed that HDS narrowly eclipsed EMC to take the top spot in the high-end RAID storage market in the third quarter of 2005.

This company is listed in Storage Management.