NEC HYDRAstor Scores High Grade from Anderson Center for Autism with Outstanding Results

Leading Non-profit School Transforms Backup and Archive Solution with NEC HYDRAstor

Santa Clara, Calif. - NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today announced that Anderson Center for Autism, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected non-profit schools, has purchased NEC HYDRAstor™ HS8 grid storage to address its storage backup and archive challenges. Anderson Center for Autism has deployed NEC HYDRAstor to upgrade the school’s backup environment and create an archiving solution on a single platform.

Backing up, archiving, accessing, and protecting data was previously a nightmare for Anderson Center for Autism. Their backup solution was antiquated with white box servers, tape drives, and thousands of tapes that were time consuming and unreliable. In addition, Anderson Center for Autism has nearly a million paper documents in boxes stored in trailers and basements. Meeting compliance requirements often meant employees had to trudge through snow drifts or encounter rats’ nests while physically digging through mountains of critical data to retrieve documents.

Further compounding the architectural issues of their previous backup and archive solution, Anderson Center for Autism had entered a period of high growth that continues today with plans to expand services, facilities and housing to meet accelerating customer needs.

“It was critical that we find a backup and archive storage solution that not only addressed today’s problems, but would be able to address the needs of our rapidly growing organization as well,” said Gregg Paulk, director of Information Technologies for Anderson Center for Autism. “We wanted a solution that was cost effective, highly reliable, fast and efficient. And, we wanted de-duplication. HYDRAstor met all of these needs.”

Since the initial partnership with NEC, Anderson Center for Autism’s backup data has more than doubled, yet Anderson Center for Autism’s backup times have been significantly reduced. Additional results have been phenomenal:
Cost-effective
The cost to Anderson Center for Autism is under $0.70 per GB.
Reliable and redundant
When testing the system, Anderson Center for Autism literally pulled the plug to create a 25% resource loss and the system kept running without interrupting backups or restores and no data was lost.
Not a single backup has ever failed.
Fast backup and restore
Backup windows have been reduced from 60 hours to six hours - a 90% improvement - and with twice as much data on twice the amount of servers than before deploying HYDRAstor.
Enterprise de-duplication
Anderson is getting a 39:1 de-duplication ratio.
Beyond a great de-duplication ratio, Anderson Center for Autism has noted that HYDRAstor delivers industry leading scope, performance and protection.
Scope - HYDRAstor de-duplicates backup and archive data on a single platform.
Performance - Both the de-duplication ratio and performance has continued to increase over time.
Protection - As demonstrated when they pulled the plug to test protection, Anderson Center for Autism found that HYDRAstor offers 300 percent more protection than RAID5 with similar storage overhead.
Easy to install
The entire HYDRAstor solution was installed and running in 68 minutes.

Additional benefits that Anderson Center for Autism has appreciated are:
Scalability - Nodes can be added on the fly without downtime to scale both capacity and performance.
Incredible resiliency - Anderson Center for Autism tested the system by bringing down 25% of the nodes and still successfully completed backup and restore.
Granular, easy, flexible management - HYDRAstor has an excellent GUI and Anderson Center for Autism has been able to choose between setting up one large backup job or multiple granular jobs. Data resiliency using Distributed Resilient Data technology can be set based on data value to provide flexible protection for de-duplicated data.
Superior customer service - Anderson Center for Autism has acknowledged NEC for both the best response time of all their support teams and direct interface to an extremely knowledgeable engineering team.

“To transform its IT department, Anderson Center for Autism needed to efficiently manage its information growth and improve data protection,” said Karen Dutch, vice president, Advanced Storage Products Group, NEC Corporation of America. “NEC HYDRAstor was a perfect fit for a progressive, service-oriented organization like Anderson Center for Autism. The product not only offers a great de-duplication ratio, but also provides a strategic grid platform that can seamlessly grow with their business needs and uniquely provides better protection, scope, and performance, so that the quality and reach of the education Anderson Center for Autism offers can continue to improve and grow.”

Anderson Center for Autism continues to work with NEC through additional phases of their IT infrastructure transformation and growth. They are now in the process of updating their archive system on NEC HYDRAstor.

“Committing to NEC beyond being a beta tester was a simple decision to make due to our amazing results with HYDRAstor’s cost-effectiveness, efficiency, reliability and speed,” said Paulk. “Having NEC’s revolutionary grid storage system has enabled us to become a more efficient organization, utilizing cutting edge technology to help the school serve children and adults more effectively.”

Gregg Paulk will be speaking about Anderson Center for Autism’s storage transformation in “Rats Nests, Snow Drifts and Trailers: Moving Storage Out of the Basement and onto a Unified Platform” at the upcoming Computerworld SNIA Storage Networking World conference on Tuesday, April 8 at 4:55 p.m. inside the Sebastian 1-3 room of the Rosen Shingle Resort in Orlando, Florida. More information can be found online at: http://www.snwusa.com/agendaS08/tues455d.html.