NEC Enhanced HYDRAstor Grid Storage Platform

NEC Corporation of America announced archive enhancements to NEC’s grid storage platform, HYDRAstor, that make it an even more ideal, cost-effective, green solution for long-term data retention and online data access.

These enhancements, combined with HYDRAstor’s self-evolving capabilities, are putting an end to the pain and cost of forklift upgrades and data migration required to store and access data over decades. In addition, this latest release boosts HYDRAstor performance by 67 percent.
 
"With secondary (or long-term) enterprise storage consumption expected to increase more than seven-fold by 2012 and at a much faster rate than primary storage, organizations need to re-think how they store data for the long-term," said Dave Russell, research vice president at Gartner. "A highly resilient storage solution primed for archiving, that self-evolves with the ability to intermix several generations of technology, offers global deduplication, great scalability, and automates provisioning, migration, workload balancing and system management will be the key features of a storage solution that the market will demand."
 
HYDRAstor is designed to be future-evolving, enabling newer generation nodes to work seamlessly together with older generation nodes to allow the storage grid to evolve with ever-greener, denser, faster technologies-without having to start a new grid system and without data migration, provisioning, forklift upgrades, application downtime or data loss. This capability alone can save an organization a significant amount of money in downtime, migration, and reconfiguration costs over decades of data retention and retrieval.
 
According to IT research firm TheInfoPro, on average, large enterprises annually spend an estimated $300,000 for data migration software and Fortune 1000 firms allocate 41 percent of their storage budgets to refresh events. "Large and mid-size enterprises annually spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on online data migration software." commented Rob Stevenson, managing director of storage research, TheInfoPro. "However, even more impressive than those spending patterns is the labor and other costs involved with migrations such as downtime, increased staffing costs, additional hardware needs, and business disruptions. These conditions can easily result in costs that are exponentially more than what organizations spend on data migration software tools. When you take into account that these are annual spending trends in an era where data has to be stored for decades, it is possible that cumulative costs exceed tens of millions of dollars."
 
NEC is making HYDRAstor even more attractive
for long-term data retention
with enhanced archive capabilities
New Archive Features Further Complement HYDRAstor’s Self-Evolving Capability The latest HYDRAstor update improves flexibility, granularity, efficiency and scalability and features the following archive extensions:

• HYDRAlock: HYDRAlock is HYDRAstor’s new Write Once Read Many (WORM) capability which prevents the accidental or intentional erasing or altering of documents, emails and other corporate records. By eliminating the lifespan limitations inherent to other WORM devices, HYDRAlock ensures the authenticity of critical data while maintaining the chain of custody for regulated business environments.
• Granular Resiliency Control: HYDRAstor now features greater file system granularity for Distributed Resilient Data (DRD) protection, supporting an intermix of multiple resiliency classes and dynamically configurable tradeoffs between the level of protection and associated capacity overhead across different applications.
• In-flight Data Encryption: Integrated data encryption capability protects data from unauthorized access while data is replicated between independent grids. In addition to built-in data protection and automatic distribution while at rest, HYDRAstor offers the option to encrypt sensitive data while in-flight during replication to another grid with RepliGrid™ WAN-optimized asynchronous replication.
• Quota Management: HYDRAstor now provides configurable control over the maximum effective capacity allocated for each file system and its associated application. With quota management and support for both hard and soft quotas with threshold notifications, HYDRAstor offers the ability to contain storage capacity consumption to reserve sufficient capacity for other applications such as critical archive data.

"We’ve really seen the return on our initial investment as we’ve been able to take advantage of each new upgrade with HYDRAstor since our early adopter installation in 2007," said Scott Ashton, LAN/WAN specialist, TLC Engineering for Architecture. "We increased our performance with the new nodes NEC introduced last fall and have more recently been able to realize the advantages of the remote replication for disaster recovery purposes. We are really looking forward to taking advantage of the new in-flight encryption and quota management functions as well."
 
Major Performance Enhancement
NEC has boosted HYDRAstor performance by 67 percent. With the new software enhancements and more efficient inter-node data transfer and communication, existing HS8-2000 grids can now deliver up to 1.8 TB per hour per Accelerator Node and up to 90 TB per hour for the largest supported configuration of 55 Accelerator Nodes and 110 Storage Nodes.
 
"We purchased a second HYDRAstor last year for remote replication over more than 1,300 miles," said Pete Chiccino, executive vice president and chief information officer, The Bancorp, Inc. "When we installed the second generation nodes, the performance boost was phenomenal. And, with the application aware deduplication for CommVault we’ve optimized storage efficiency with a four times improvement in space reduction. We’re ready to take HYDRAstor to the next level with additional applications leveraging the upcoming performance boost and more granular resiliency levels."
 
Further Extension
to HYDRAstor’s Application-Aware Deduplication
The latest HYDRAstor software now offers enhanced application-aware deduplication for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC NetWorker backup applications in addition to previously existing support for CommVault Simpana and Symantec NetBackup. HYDRAstor’s global deduplication already cuts storage capacity needs by 95 percent or more across the enterprise and delivers up to 50 percent more efficient deduplication than siloed appliances whose deduplication scope is limited to the physical and logical boundaries of each appliance. Application-aware deduplication delivers even greater space reduction ratios and more efficient capacity optimization.
 
Capacity On-demand
Logical capacity can be expanded for an ancillary fee at a later time without requiring any physical components be added to the system. This capability provides organizations with more flexible and granular growth options.
 
"With HYDRAstor, it has been our vision to create a storage platform for the next 100 years and meet the challenges of businesses’ growing data storage needs," said Gideon Senderov, director of product management and technical marking, IT Platform Group, NEC Corporation of America. "We are continually extending HYDRAstor’s capabilities to boost performance, enhance functionality, and improve efficiency, flexibility, and scalability."
 
NEC is also introducing new, lower-capacity models of HYDRAstor in 12TB raw capacity (over 150 TB effective capacity); 24TB (over 300 TB effective capacity) and 36 TB (over 450 TB effective capacity) configurations. These entry-level configurations are ideal for organizations that are suffering from high secondary data growth and constrained budgets, but want and need to take advantage of the long-term efficiencies and savings of HYDRAstor’s self-evolving capabilities. Using the new capacity on-demand capability, additional capacity can be licensed without adding any components to the system.
 
The new software enhancements that improve performance and efficiency of the HYDRAstor storage platform are included under HYDRAstor’s software maintenance agreement and are available to both existing and new customers at no additional cost. These include the immediate performance boost, in-flight data encryption, quota management, granular resiliency classes, and application-aware deduplication enhancements. Existing customers can immediately enjoy the benefits of higher deduplication ratios, improved efficiency, and higher throughput, maximizing the return on their original investment. For customers looking to leverage the newly added WORM capability, NEC offers a simple licensing model that allows customers to license that capability for only the portion of the grid for which they need it. This flexible licensing model is designed to suit the individual needs of any business and matches the current approach used for the HYDRAstor RepliGrid WAN-optimized replication functionality.