NEC Delivers Industry’s Only Self-Evolving Storage Platform: One System Forever

New Nodes-Greener, Denser, Faster-Work with Previous and Future Generations,
Allow IT to Non-disruptively Ride Both Technology and Growth Curves
Santa Clara, Calif. - NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today unveiled the second generation of the NEC HYDRAstor™ HS8 grid storage platform, delivering the industry’s only self-evolving storage solution. The new HYDRAstor nodes announced today—which are greener, denser, and faster—work seamlessly with both previous and future generations of HYDRAstor nodes. This heterogeneous feature of the HYDRAstor grid platform allows the storage grid to evolve with new technologies—without having to start a new grid system and without data migration, provisioning, forklift upgrades, application downtimes and data loss. HYDRAstor’s unique “community of smart nodes” enables IT to non-disruptively ride both technology and growth curves so that a single storage grid can continually evolve with greener, denser, and faster nodes.

“The elegance of NEC HYDRAstor’s architecture just came to life with this announcement. Their ability to use new technology without replacing old technology, and scale indefinitely, while maintaining a single point of management is the holy grail of storage,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. “So is the ability of the customer to choose the level of availability they desire, without having to sacrifice huge amounts of storage. This feature is still rare in the industry. The combination of these functions has produced a strong product for the market.”

The latest generation HYDRAstor HS8-2000 smart nodes, which can be added directly to existing HS8-1000 based grids, now provides four times greater disk capacity, three times higher performance, 67 percent lower power consumption and 40 percent less cost per terabyte than their HS8-1000 predecessors. These new nodes can be added into any existing HYDRAstor system without provisioning or forklift upgrades, making systems immediately greener, more scalable and faster. Automatic data load balancing and self-tuning automates all management tasks. By enabling multiple generations of nodes to coexist in a single grid, HYDRAstor reduces TCO by extending the life of older technology and allowing IT to more quickly and cost effectively leverage new technology in support of current business requirements.

“As a storage reseller with an established clientele, we often have customers making decisions to forgo the latest technological innovations because it would mean a complete system overhaul,” said Ron Robinson, CEO of IT Data Storage. “They end up spending more money in the long run to increase scalability and eventually replace the entire system—all without the benefit of taking advantage of new technology along the way. HYDRAstor’s evolutionary capability to intermix new nodes with previous generations to increase scalability, performance, and power and space efficiencies is radically unique. Additionally, we have seen a lot of interest in NEC HYDRAstor in both the commercial and federal space to be utilized as part of information lifecycle management initiatives in addition to data archival and backup.”

“We’re excited to deliver on the HYDRAstor grid promise—not only do these new ’smart nodes’ benefit new customers, existing customers can immediately leverage our latest technology without a forklift upgrade, without data migration and without decommissioning existing technology bought in the last year,” said Karen Dutch, vice president of Advanced Storage Products, NEC Corporation of America. “NEC is committed to helping existing and new customers evolve their storage grids with greener, denser, faster nodes that deliver true global deduplication with near limitless, independent scalability of capacity and performance.”

Lean, Mean and Green: NEC HYDRAstor HS8-2000 Packs a Punch
NEC HYDRAstor HS8-2000 offers more performance and capacity in a smaller footprint using less power per MB per second throughput and per TB of storage capacity. A standard entry level configuration of one Accelerator Node and two Storage Nodes provides 315 TB of effective capacity with 300 MB per second throughput performance.
Performance: Each new NEC HYDRAstor HS8-2000 Accelerator Node provides 300 MB per second performance per Accelerator Node, a three times higher performance improvement over the previous generation of Accelerator Nodes.
Capacity: Each new HYDRAstor HS8-2000 Storage Node provides raw capacity of 12 TB and effective capacity of 157.5 TB (based on a 20:1 deduplication ratio with a default protection three times greater than RAID 5). This is four times greater capacity than the previous generation of Storage Nodes.
Footprint: At 300 MB per second per Accelerator Node unit and 157.5 TB per Storage Node unit, the HS8-2000 packs 300 percent more performance and 400 percent more storage capacity in the same amount of space as the previous generation of HYDRAstor nodes.
Energy: The HS8-2000 Accelerator Node uses only 1.3 Watts per MB per second while the Storage Nodes use only 3.8 Watts per TB of storage. This represents 67 percent less power usage for an equal performance and storage capacity when compared to nodes from the previous generation.

In addition, NEC’s HYDRAstor HS8-2000 has enhanced replication capability with many to one replication functionality through HYDRAstor RepliGrid™. HYDRAstor RepliGrid provides asynchronous grid-to-grid replication for disaster recovery with deduplication across all replicated HYDRAstor grids. Grid-wide deduplication minimizes network bandwidth requirements as well as disaster recovery site capacity requirements. With HYDRAstor’s granular data selection, customers can replicate just what they want, instead of being forced to replicate everything in their system at greater cost.

“Data storage is a key component to any disaster recovery model,” said John Lindeman, vice president and technology officer, SunGard Availability Services. “With so many IT organizations facing the challenges of storing, managing and protecting growing volumes of data under confined budgets, a more inclusive approach to a backup and recovery solutions is in high demand. The implementation of a backup and archive grid storage system, such as HYDRAstor, within a disaster recovery model is the most comprehensive approach to facing these challenges.”

Same Great Benefits of HYDRAstor Grid Storage Architecture
Unrestricted, independent, linear scalability: NEC’s HYDRAstor grid architecture uniquely enables both performance and capacity to be scaled independently and linearly to meet customers’ specific requirements. If more performance is needed, customers can add Accelerator Nodes, and if more capacity is needed, customers simply add Storage Nodes. Customers can scale performance up or down as needed, all without provisioning, downtime, forklift upgrades or data loss and all as one logical pool of capacity and processing power. In addition, NEC has tested scalability to 165 nodes with a variety of Accelerator and Storage Node configurations including 16,500 MB/sec with 17.3 PB of disk capacity and 9,900 MB/sec with 20.8 PB of disk capacity. HYDRAstor’s advanced grid storage platform can be configured to meet the most stringent data center needs and can reduce backup windows and archive times by up to 90 percent and slash data restore times by half.

Global enterprise deduplication: HYDRAstor’s DataRedux™ technology leverages a fully distributed hash table to fully maximize deduplication storage efficiency within a single pool for both backup and archives. HYDRAstor’s unified global deduplication cuts data storage capacity needs by 95 percent or more across the enterprise and delivers up to 50 percent more efficient deduplication than siloed VTLs and appliances where deduplication is limited to one system. In addition, because the hash table is fully distributed across NEC’s two-tier performance and capacity architecture, performance actually improves with deduplication. NEC’s patent-pending Distributed Resilient Data™ (DRD) technology protects deduplicated data beyond today’s RAID technology. With DRD, IT can dial in their desired data resiliency level via the GUI. The default setting of three protects against three disk or node failures delivering three times more resiliency than RAID 5 with a similar storage capacity overhead and 1.5 times more resiliency than RAID 6 with 25 percent less overhead. More importantly, unlike RAID where rebuilds can take eight or more hours with 50 percent or more impact on performance, DRD ensures no performance degradation during a data rebuild operation.

Effortless management: DynamicStor™ intelligent management software from NEC functions as the ’brain’ of HYDRAstor. Self-managing and self-tuning, DynamicStor allows non-disruptive add, remove and upgrade functions and supports industry standards such as SNMP. Combined with HYDRAstor’s management dashboard, DynamicStor makes management effortless and reduces complexity and administrator costs, while improving staff productivity. The Web browser based GUI allows for quick and easy monitoring of deduplication ratios, capacity utilization and trending, and system status. In addition, a new HYDRAstor installation goes from “box to backup” in less than 45 minutes.

Pricing and Availability
NEC will start shipping the HYDRAstor HS8-2000 on September 19, 2008. Six pre-configured models will be available, including two stand-alone versions and four versions in dedicated cabinets with switches & cabling pre-installed. *List pricing starts at $180,000 or $0.57/GB for a 1 Accelerator Node, 2 Storage Node configuration. Any HYDRAstor grid, including all pre-configured models can be expanded non-disruptively at any time by adding individual Accelerator and Storage Nodes.