TLC Engineering Buys NEC HYDRAstor Storage Grid

NEC Corporation of America announced that TLC Engineering, one of the largest and most respected engineering firms in the country, has chosen NEC as its standard platform to build a cost effective solution for a scalable, highly reliable data center. The company purchased a total NEC solution that includes the HYDRAstor HS8-1010 grid storage system, NEC D1-10 storage arrays, and NEC Express5800/120R series servers to run TLC’s storage, office and engineering applications. The need to improve backup operations, decrease restore time, easily expand storage capability and scalability, and enable high reliability, were the primary business drivers.

"Basically, our backup environment was outdated and we were running out of space on our existing servers and storage systems," explains Scott Ashton, network engineer, TLC. "Our CAD files are just getting bigger and bigger, and the previous solution couldn’t expand efficiently or quickly enough. The NEC products are very cost-effective, easily expandable and simple to manage. We considered alternative solutions, but they were far too expensive."

Reliability and a proven track record were other factors influencing TLC’s decision. "I had used NEC products in the past and had very good experiences with them," states Ashton.

In addition to the general need for scalability, reliability, manageability and cost-effectiveness, TLC had the following requirements:

• Capability to evolve from a tape-based backup approach to a disk-based backup solution with safe data deduplication
• Improved overall server and storage performance at a cost-effective price point
• Faster backup and restoration of data

"The portfolio of NEC infrastructure products that we adopted fit seamlessly together and fit our exact requirements. With the HYDRAstor HS8-1010 grid storage, D1-10 storage arrays and Express5800 servers we have been able to significantly reduce our backup window with no backup failures or data loss," says Ashton.

"NEC provides smart IT choices for the enterprise. Our flexible IT infrastructure solutions assist IT departments facing limited financial, space and power resources," says Dave Davenport, senior vice president, IT Platform and Solutions, NEC Corporation of America. "We are pleased that TLC was able to simplify the manageability of their platform with an all NEC solution, scale non-disruptively, and maximize their investment by tapping into NEC’s dynamic infrastructure portfolio."

"Our previous tape-based backup solution couldn’t keep up with our growth. We couldn’t backup during the day because the performance degradation literally required employees to stop working," says Ashton. "Now, we can now run three or four backups per day without interruption, ensuring we don’t lose a client due to a lost document or a missed deliverable. NEC’s technologies, like HYDRAstor’s deduplication technology, are a ‘must-have’ capability to help us manage data growth better and costs long-term."

TLC has also deployed D1-1010 arrays and the Express5800/120R series servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with measurable results. TLC has clustered Microsoft Exchange 2007 running on NEC servers and D1 storage arrays to improve performance of the company’s email system. Additional D1 storage arrays store the company’s large CAD files and Microsoft Office documents.

"Before we chose NEC as our supplier, IT expansion for company data was a slow and tedious process that involved adding additional servers and storage to keep pace with capacity demands," says Ashton. "Now I have highly reliable servers, and I can just add drives to the D1 arrays non-disruptively. We also noticed significant improvement in data access speeds during testing. We can now access our backup data remotely and restore data immediately to the D1 arrays. Prior to this improvement, we had to restore data from tape backups, which was a lengthy process. Deploying a complete NEC technology solution has significantly improved productivity for our company."

NEC Products Deployed in TLC’s Data Center

NEC HYDRASTOR HS8 grid storage is a unified disk platform optimized for backup and archive that delivers excellent total cost of ownership through:

• unrestricted scalability for reduced complexity and cost;
• a self-evolving system that accelerates the business value of new technology;
• effortless management for improved staff productivity and lower operational costs; and safe, enterprise deduplication to maximize storage efficiency without data loss.

NEC’s D1-10 storage arrays are an entry-level model that offers excellent performance, reduced cost of ownership, and support for mixed SAS/SATA configurations to construct tiered storage differing service level requirements. The D1-10 supports four high-speed 4Gbps host connections and includes high-performance RAID processors with NEC unique Triple Mirror(TM) RAID protection and Phoenix technology for ultimate reliability. Snapshot, replication, MAID, and WORM capabilities are available.

NEC Express5800/120R series slim rack servers are designed for small- and medium-sized businesses. This affordably priced two-processor server offers outstanding server performance, availability and value. This high performance server delivers exceptional scalability, reliability and manageability. NEC offers a complete line of highly reliable Intel(R)-based servers designed for flexibility and high availability in a wide choice of configurations – including tower, rack, and blade – from single- to 32-processor options and fully redundant fault tolerant servers. With very high MTBF ratings, NEC servers typically outlast other servers, delivering the best overall total cost of ownership.

TLC Engineering

NEC Corporation of America