A key area of focus for the two companies continues to be helping customers manage and store the enormous volume of e-mail they must maintain, while meeting corporate governance and regulatory compliance mandates, they say.

HDS storage solutions will support Open Text's latest e-mail management offerings, including new solutions that integrate e-mail archiving capabilities with records management software, so customers can apply legal and regulatory policies to e-mail, the companies add.

"The combined solutions will offer customers a virtually limitless mailbox archive, while improving e-mail performance and reducing the pressure on e-mail servers," explains Fanie van Rensburg, MD of local HDS distributor, Shoden Data Systems. "The goal is to enable customers to tightly align their IT infrastructures with their business imperatives by optimising their storage environments to the needs of their business-critical applications. Archiving data for these applications is key to managing cost and ensuring regulatory compliance."

The companies say that they are also working together to provide a comprehensive set of archival and compliance solutions for enterprise applications, combining the data lifecycle management capabilities of HDS' storage platforms with Open Text's ECM software.

These solutions aim to let customers store, manage, retrieve and archive documents from SAP systems such as mySAP ERP Financials and mySAP Human Capital Management.

All of these solutions are said to be supported on the breadth of Hitachi Data Systems' family of storage platforms, from the Hitachi Thunder 9500V Series modular storage to the new Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform.