HCE-5920 testing - Certified Specialist: Pentaho Data Integration Implementation Updated: 2024

IBM Hitachi Data Systems

The NAS 300, unveiled last year, currently allows IBM's FAStT and Shark arrays to be connected as a NAS subsystem, said Bob Mahoney, vice president for IBM's storage networking solutions.

IBM is working with Hitachi on the testing and hopes to make an announcement in the second quarter, Mahoney said.

By allowing an Hitachi array to connect to IBM's NAS gateway, IBM risks increased competition not only from Hitachi, but from Sun Microsystems, which resells the 9900 array, and from Hewlett-Packard, which OEMs the 7700 and 9900.

Mahoney said he is not concerned about potential competition because customers already have heterogeneous storage environments and IBM is looking to meet their needs.

"The way we look at it is, we are going to provide to our customers what our customers are asking us for," Mahoney said. "Interoperability in an open environment--that is our commitment. We believe that is what our customers are asking for, and it is what we are going to provide. Will that open up the avenue for more Hitachi? Possibly. But on the other hand, we've been growing our storage business dramatically over the past couple of quarters, and we are very confident in our technology and in our storage devices, and in our plans for the future."

Mahoney would not discuss plans to test interoperability with storage arrays from other vendors, other than to say that Hitachi for now is the only one to accept IBM's invitation to jointly test the solution.

In related news, Adalio Sanchez, general manager for IBM's Storage Networking Division, expects the iSCSI storage market to take off next year.

IBM has been shipping an iSCSI appliance for about a year. However, said Sanchez, the market is still in its infancy because the iSCSI standard will not be ratified until possibly mid-summer, and TCP offload engines are still six months or more away from being widely available.

A Hitachi Ltd. subsidiary that makes automotive parts has acknowledged it was involved in misconduct dating back 20 years.

The improper behavior included faking data in routine brake testing and shipping suspension parts that did not meet the required standards.

Hitachi Astemo Ltd. supplied the questionable products to 16 companies, including leading domestic automakers.

The company apologized for the malpractice at an online news conference on Dec. 22, but declined to provide further details, citing the confidentiality of the contracts.

Hitachi Astemo said it is now trying to determine how many cars used those parts.

Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Honda Motor Co. and Subaru Corp. each received those products, an Asahi Shimbun investigation found.

Although the parts are believed to have been used in many vehicles, Hitachi Astemo said it does not believe they pose any safety or performance problems.

Toyota said an in-house inspection of the parts conducted based on data provided by Hitachi Astemo showed no problems with their performance or safety. Nissan, Honda and Subaru reported similar assessments.

Hitachi Astemo said fake data was listed in the inspection reports for five kinds of brake products manufactured at its Yamanashi factory in Minami-Alps, Yamanashi Prefecture, without having conducted any of the testing it agreed upon with its client companies.

The products were supplied to nine client companies.

Between October 2003 and March 2021, fake data was listed in about 57,000 cases.

At its Fukushima factory in Kori, Fukushima Prefecture, testing outcomes of two varieties of suspension parts had been falsified to meet a range of figures under the required standards.

They were shipped to five client companies. This kind of falsification was discovered in 259 cases, apparently starting in 2000.

Apart from this, the same factory had supplied 4.8 million units of four kinds of suspension parts that did not comply with the standards to 14 client companies since April 2018.

In addition, the company shipped 5.3 million units after it had altered the test results.

Hitachi Astemo was established in January by merging four automotive part manufacturers under the Hitachi and Honda groups. Hitachi controls 66.6 percent of the company.

The two factories belonged to the Hitachi group before the merger.

The misconduct first surfaced thanks to a whistleblower in December 2020, when Hitachi Ltd.’s quality assurance department audited group companies.

Hitachi Astemo confirmed the malfeasance at the Yamanashi factory in January and admitted the wrongdoing for the first time on Dec. 22.

But Hitachi’s investigation was apparently insufficient. The malpractice at the Fukushima factory continued until October.

Brice Koch, president and CEO of Hitachi Astemo, said at the news conference the company had to wait until this month to announce the misconduct as it has been going through thousands of records to grasp the details and put in place measures to correct the situation.

Koch said data was falsified because workers did not realize the importance of the testing and the company had allocated an insufficient number of workers to conduct it properly.

The latest announcement follows a flurry of data-fabrication scandals at major Hitachi subsidiaries.

One involved then-Hitachi Chemical Co., whose large-scale falsification of data on the performance of industrial-use rechargeable batteries came to light in 2018.

That prompted Hitachi to launch thorough investigations into the quality of products and the inspection systems of its group companies.

Two years later, however, similar misconduct was revealed at Hitachi Metals Ltd.

(This article was written by Koichi Murakami and Kenji Izawa.)

That is a significant improvement over existing remote replication using FCIP, which typically tops out at distances of between 37 and 45 miles, according to Audrey Harman, manager of technical staff at Sprint's Concept Realization Center.

The test was conducted at the center using an FCIP connection from the Sprint lab in Overland Park, Kan., to optical cross-connect devices at Sprint's lab in Burlingame, Calif., to create a loop back to the Overland Park lab, simulating a point-to-point connection of 3,600 miles, the company said.

The link was created using Sprint circuits, Cisco MDS 9000 SAN switches with Cisco MDS 9000 IP Storage modules, and Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 V Series with Hitachi TrueCopy data-replication software.

"We are giving customers the flexibility to leverage lower-cost IP transmissions for business continuity and disaster recovery, without adding fiber to their premises," Harman said. "They can now replicate data at significantly longer distances and have that managed by us."

Japanese industrial conglomerates Hitachi Ltd. and Toshiba Corp., as well as Miraca Holdings subsidiary Fujirebio, said on Friday they will jointly set up a facility to produce antigen coronavirus testing kits.

The line would help double production of Fujirebio’s testing kits, which received government approval in May, to 400,000 a week, the companies said. It would start operations by December in northern Hokkaido prefecture.

Antigen tests scan for proteins found on or inside a virus. They can detect the virus quickly but produce false negatives at a higher rate than the currently dominant polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.

It takes about 30 minutes to get a result with Fujirebio’s palm-sized antigen test kit, compared with four to six hours for a PCR test.

In a rare partnership, Hitachi will provide engineering know-how, while Toshiba will offer facilities. Fujirebio currently produces test kits at a plant in southern Japan.

The new coronavirus has infected more than 6.4 million people and killed about 380,000 around the world. Japan has had some 17,000 infections and 900 known deaths to date.

5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and its oral analog capecitabine are fluoropyrimidine chemotherapy agents used in several solid tumors. Approximately 5% of patients inherit diminished or null activity genetic variants in DPYD, which encodes the enzyme that metabolizes fluoropyrimidine, leading to higher systemic drug exposure and increased risk of severe and fatal toxicity. Many European countries recommend DPD/DPYD screening prior to fluoropyrimidine treatment and there are guidelines from Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) that recommend safe fluoropyrimidine starting doses in known DPYD carriers. However, DPYD testing is not recommended by the FDA or clinical oncology practice guidelines, which has led to minimal testing in the United States. One of the main reasons for the lack of clinical uptake is the cost of testing large numbers of patients to find the relatively uncommon (~5%) DPYD carriers. A potential solution that has not been explored, to our knowledge, is to use existing research-only genetic data to identify suspected carriers of actionable genotypes who should undergo confirmatory testing prior to treatment. This talk will summarize the evidence of the clinical benefit of pre-treatment DPYD testing and the reasons that testing is rarely conducted in the US. I will then describe ongoing work to use an institutional genetic data repository for ultra-efficient DPYD implementation at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. Finally, I will describe our efforts to get oncology clinical guidelines and the FDA to recommend pre-treatment DPYD testing and give the audience a simple way to support our effort. 

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the five actionable DPYD variants that increase risk of fluoropyrimidine toxicity

2. Describe the main reasons that pre-treatment DPYD testing is not conducted in the United States

3. Recognize the benefits of using existing institutional genetic data for efficient pharmacogenetic implementation

Jacob Creswell¹*, Andrew J Codlin², Emmanuel Andre³, Mark A Micek^4,5, Ahmed Bedru⁶, E Jane Carter⁷, Rajendra-Prasad Yadav⁸, Andrei Mosneaga⁹, Bishwa Rai¹⁰, Sayera Banu¹¹, Miranda Brouwer¹², Lucie Blok¹³, Suvanand Sahu¹ and Lucica Ditiu¹

¹Stop TB Partnership, Secretariat, Geneva, Switzerland. ²Interactive Research and Development, Karachi, Pakistan. ³Pôle de Microbiologie, Institut de Recherche Expérimentale et Clinique (IREC), Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Brussels, Belgium. ⁴Health Alliance International, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. ⁵University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA. ⁶Project HOPE, Mulanje, Malawi. ⁷Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University, Providence, RI, USA. ⁸Stop TB Unit, WHO, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. ⁹Center for Health Policies and Studies, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. ¹⁰International Organization for Migration, Kathmandu, Nepal. ¹¹Tuberculosis & Leprosy Research Group; Centre for Communicable Diseases; International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh. ¹²PHTB Consult, Tilburg, Netherlands. ¹³KIT Development Policy & Practice, Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands

*Correspondence
creswellj@who.int