Japanese hardware maker Hitachi announced that 3PAR F-Class, T-Class and P10000 V-Class systems will ship with its 3.5-inch Fibre Channel Ultrastar SLC-based solid  state drives in them. The Ultrastar SSD400S SSD line-up is specially designed for OEMs, and Hewlett-Packard, which acquired 3PAR over a year ago, is a major addition to its growing partner ecosystem.

“We are gratified that HP has chosen to qualify our SSDs for their storage arrays. Other customer feedback has been similarly positive, continuing Hitachi’s legacy of delivering quality products to the market that are fine-tuned to meet the changing needs of the enterprise datacenter and the cloud,” says Brendan Collins, vice president of Product Marketing at Hitachi GST.

Hitachi is one of the many tech firms out there that base a big part of their growth strategy on expanding their partnerbase, especially on a global scale.  This approach has proved successful for the company so far.

Hitachi and VMware teamed-up to deliver a new financial offering called Private Cloud for Finance Institutes to the Asian market that leverages vSphere and the vFabric Cloud Application Platform.  The Japanese electronics company is also working on a far larger team-up: backed by $2.6 billion from the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the Hitachi Displays, Sony Mobile Display and Toshiba Mobile Display subsidiaries will become one company in 2012.

Going back to June, Hitachi crossed another milestone by entering the converged network market. It launched two blade servers and revealed a partnership with Microsoft that resulted in an appliance for Microsoft Exchange 2010.

In addition to these players, a tie to HP’s 3PAR will provide an additional boost in customer acquisition. Hewlett-Packard is interested in maximizing the RoI on its multibillion investment in acquiring 3PAR, which is why it’s pushing this part of its portfolio so eagerly.   Back at VMworld HP launched a cloud-in-a-box offering called VirtualSystem based on 3PAR and Lefthand technology.