In his new role, Das will be responsible for worldwide product planning and strategy, positioning, promoting and fulfillment, says the company.

"We are very pleased to welcome Raj to the Hitachi GST team," says Shinjiro Iwata, executive vice president of Hitachi GST. "His proven marketing and product management expertise, technical background and leadership will play a key role in accelerating our worldwide marketing efforts."

Hitachi GST says Das brings nearly two decades of experience leading product planning and marketing organizations in the storage industry. Prior to joining Hitachi GST, Das was vice president at SGI where he was responsible for product management, product and channel marketing and outbound activities for the company's storage product division. Das has also held senior-level positions at Brocade Communications and McDATA.

According to the Hitachi GST website, the global storage technologies division was founded in 2003 and was formed as  "a result of the strategic combination of IBM and Hitachi's storage technology businesses."
 
The company develops "advanced hard disk drives to store and preserve the world's valued data" and says it offers a range of hard drive products for desktop computers, high-performance storage systems and servers, notebooks and consumer devices.

Storage is one of Hitachi's five core businesses, says the company.

Last month, parent company, Hitachi, expanded its "green" data center in Yokohama, Japan as part of its overall CoolCenter50 project, which plans to reduce power consumption in Hitachi's Yokohama and Okayama facility by 50 percent in five years.