NEC Storage Platform Reduces Cost, Complexity

NEC of America announced March 12 that within the next six months it will release Hydrastor, a grid storage architecture providing enterprises with a set of data management services.

Hydrastor is made up of nodes running NECs DynamicStor intelligent management software, which provides the intelligence and data management services for Hydrastor such as self-management, self-healing, data reduction and improved data resiliency.

“Hydrastor reduces storage infrastructure complexity, administration cost and management overhead, enabling IT to manage information and not just infrastructure,” said Karen Dutch, general manager of advanced storage products for the Irving, Texas, company.

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Hydrastor uses both accelerator nodes, to deliver performance, and storage nodes, to deliver storage capacity, providing enterprises with such features as the ability to add, remove and upgrade nodes to allow IT departments to protect their data.

The storage platform will allow enterprises to move data to other nodes without affecting application performance or availability. As nodes are added, Hydrastor will be able to identify its capacity and use it automatically while previously stored data is automatically load-balanced.

NECs Hydrastor also uses DataRedux technology to allow enterprises to reduce storage requirements while getting rid of data duplication across and within data streams. It also features improved resiliency using its Distributed Resilient Data technology, as Hydrastor enables business users to customize resiliency levels to protect against disk or node failures.

“With Hydrastor, IT can refocus resources and deliver storage as a strategic service to businesses while meeting increasingly strict SLAs [service-level agreements] and business policies on information control, protection, storage and retrieval,” Dutch said.

Currently, Hydrastor is in beta testing with five external customers; general availability will be announced within the next six months. Pricing for Hydrastor is expected to be less than $1 per gigabyte.

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