NEC Corporation of America Introduces First Unified Mid-Range Modular and Enterprise Storage System to Allow Non-Disruptive Online Upgrades

New NEC D-Series Sets New Storage Standard, Enabling Scalability Without ’Rip and Replace’ Disruption to Performance and Availability

Santa Clara, Calif.,- NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today introduced the NEC D-Series storage systems that set a new standard for massive scalability, high performance and high availability.

Using the D-Series storage arrays, small to large enterprises can for the first time non-disruptively and cost-effectively scale storage from 219 GB to 1.152 PB-upgrades that can be made while the systems remain online. Non-disruptive upgrades are possible with the NEC D-Series’ revolutionary design, the first to unify the characteristics of mid-range modular and enterprise storage architectures in a single system. With the D-Series arrays, enterprises can also scale from 2 GB to 128 GB of cache, from four to sixty-four 4 GB-per-second fibre channels, and from three to 1,156 disk drives. This broad, non-disruptive scalability provides businesses with incredible flexibility in deploying a storage system for today’s needs that can grow to meet tomorrow’s demands.

“Customers across a broad range of industries are experiencing tremendous growth in the storage capacity and performance needed to support a successful business,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager for IDC Storage Systems. “Storage systems like the D-Series from NEC that allow customers to non-disruptively scale capacity, performance, connectivity and availability across a broad range of entry-points can provide the flexibility and investment protection that customers are seeking.”

NEC D-Series is designed to meet the most demanding requirements of enterprises’ mission critical applications for scalability, availability and business continuity. In addition to online upgrades, the new system offers unmatched functionality for maximizing throughput and availability, including:

RAID Triple Mirror (RAID-TM): Only NEC offers RAID-TM, which combines solid random access performance with continuous operation-even in the event of two hard disk drive (HDD) failures. The D-Series also includes RAID-6.
SAS disk drives: The NEC D-Series is the first tier-one storage product to feature the superior-performance Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) drives in addition to Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives.
NEC Phoenix technology: NEC’s patented Phoenix technology reduces HDD degradation, cutting the need to do rebuilds by up to 50 percent.
Cache Mirror Continuity: New with the D-Series is double-mirrored cache to maintain high response rates in the event of a cache failure.
Double Redundant Power Supply: Double redundant power ensures operational continuity in the event that multiple power supplies fail.
Scalability at Unprecedented Magnitudes: Starting at less than 219 GB and scaling to over 1.1 PB, users can mitigate the disruption caused by constant changes to their storage infrastructure.

“Enterprises of all sizes must continually manage the growth, cost and complexity of the storage systems that support their most critical business operations,” said Matthew Wolken, vice president, Fault Tolerant Servers and Data Storage of NEC Corporation of America. “With our new NEC D-Series, these companies’ decisions are simplified by the unprecedented flexibility of right-sized storage systems that can scale to support the most demanding operational and transaction environments.”

NEC D-Series Features Five Models
The new NEC D-Series is available in five storage array models. The D8-1010, D8-1020 and D8-1040 provide a non-disruptive upgrade path for mid- to large-size enterprises through NEC’s unified modular-monolithic design. The D1-10 and D3-10, which require offline upgrades, offer affordable high performance for small to medium businesses.

D8-1040 Storage Array. NEC’s D8-1040 storage array provides high-end performance accommodating the most demanding environments when both a large compliment of hosts and considerable data storage is required. The four-node version features up to 64 fibre channel ports, 1,536 SAS/SATA HDDs, and 128 GB cache.

D8-1020 Storage Array. NEC’s D8-1020 mid-range model, positioned for medium-sized businesses or enterprise business units, provides additional capacity and throughput to handle more hosts and larger storage requirements. The two-node version features up to 32 fibre channel ports, 768 SAS/SATA HDDs, and 64 GB cache.

D8-1010 Storage Array. NEC’s D8-1010 mid-range model is designed for the medium-sized businesses or enterprise departments. The single node array features up 16 fibre channel ports, 384 SAS/SATA HDDs, and 16 GB cache.

D3-10 Storage Array. NEC’s D1-30 entry-level model for small businesses or departments combines excellent performance, and reduced TCO, with greater capacity and throughput. It features up to 12 fibre channel ports, 144 SAS/SATA HDDs, and 4 GB cache.

D1-10 Storage Array. NEC’s D1-10 entry-level model for small businesses or work groups offers excellent performance and TCO reduction. It includes 4 fibre channel ports, 72 SAS/SATA HDDs, and 2 GB cache.

All of the D-Series models are backed by NEC’s storage software suite, which is designed to meet the data management and business continuity requirements to compete in the global market place. NEC’s data management software portfolio offers products in the key areas of business continuity, configuration management, performance monitoring, load balancing, seamless capacity expansion and disaster recovery.

Availability
Pricing for the D-Series starts at:
D1-10: $15,000 - available immediately
D3-10: $26,000 - available immediately
D8-Series: Prices range from $43,000 to $153,000 - available at the end of summer 2007