RAID Incorporated and NEC Expand Partnership to Deliver the Industry’s Only Self-Evolving Storage Platform to Government, Education Markets

RAID Inc.’s Technical, Market Expertise Connects with
Superior Scalability, Quality and Reliability of NEC’s HYDRAstor Grid Storage Platform
Austin, Texas. – RAID Inc., a customized storage solution and services provider specializing in leading edge technologies, today announced it has entered into an OEM agreement with NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions. RAID Inc. will license NEC’s HYDRAstor HS8 grid storage platform products and the HYDRAstor trademark and sell them under the brand RAID HYDRAstor. The new product line optimized for backup and archive will be incorporated into RAID Inc.’s suite of storage solutions for the government, high performance computing and education markets.

“RAID is excited to be expanding its partnership with NEC. NEC’s line of storage products offer our clients solutions that are not only reliable, but scalable and of the highest quality,” said Bob Picardi, COO of RAID Inc. “HYDRAstor’s innovative grid architecture enables IT to independently scale both performance and capacity and take advantage of new greener technology without a fork-lift upgrade. Global deduplication cuts capacity consumption by 95% to reduce footprint, power and cooling costs. We believe that each of our customers is unique and NEC’s HYDRAstor storage platform allows us to tailor to those individual storage needs and deliver the optimal storage solution.”

The HYDRAstor storage platform will be offered as RAID Inc.’s newest addition to the company’s suite of building block product families. It can be purchased individually or in conjunction with other RAID Inc. products to solve customers’ backup and archiving needs in the most demanding data-storage environments. RAID Inc. will complement HYDRAstor with consulting services to ensure customers will receive a solution designed to function as specified in their unique environment. HYDRAstor’s key features that make the solution ideally suited for HPC, government applications, high performance computing and education markets, include:
Self-evolving grid: HYDRAstor eliminates technology lock-in, forklift upgrades and data migration by enabling multiple generations of nodes in a single grid. Greener, faster, and denser Accelerator and Storage Nodes leveraging the latest hardware technology can be non-disruptively added to an existing HYDRAstor grid.
Unrestricted, independent, linear scalability: HYDRAstor grid architecture composed of Accelerate Nodes and Storage Nodes uniquely enables both performance and capacity to be scaled independently and linearly to meet customers’ specific requirements.
Global enterprise deduplication: HYDRAstor’s DataRedux™ technology leverages a fully distributed hash table to fully maximize deduplication storage efficiency across the entire grid. 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 virtual tape libraries and appliances where deduplication is limited to one system.
Enhanced Data Resiliency: HYDRAstor’s Distributed Resilient Data™ (DRD) technology protects deduplicated data beyond today’s RAID technology. The default setting of three protects against three disk or node failures delivering 1.5 more resiliency than RAID 6 with 25 percent less overhead.
Effortless management: Intelligent management software across the grid provides self-management and self-tuning to reduce storage complexity and administrator costs, while improving staff productivity.
Replication: 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. Granular data selection allows IT to replicate just what they want.

With HYDRAstor, RAID Inc.’s customers can:
reduce backup windows and archive times up to 90 percent
slash data restore times by half
cut data storage needs by 95 percent
improve backup, restore, and archive reliability
cost effectively replicate data offsite for enhanced disaster recovery

“NEC is committed to continuing our successful OEM partnership strategy to reach into various vertical markets,” said Karen Dutch, vice president of Advanced Storage Products, IT Platform Group, NEC Corporation of America. “Following on our success with NEC’s D-Series Enterprise Modular Storage OEM agreement with RAID Inc., we now look forward to bringing the HYDRAstor grid storage platform to the HPC and government markets through a trusted advisor who delivers strong technical expertise and support infrastructure to their customers. HYDRAstor is the industry’s only self-evolving storage platform, delivering a single storage grid that can continually evolve with greener, denser, and faster nodes.”

HYDRAstor helps IT deliver optimized backup, archive and restore services while reducing complexity, management overhead, and environmental costs.

HYDRAstor will be showcased at the Supercomputing (SC) 2008 Conference in NEC booth 1319 and RAID booth 2339, from November 17-21, 2008, in Austin, Texas.