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 D-Series Enterprise Modular Storage products and sell them under the RAID Inc. brand. The new product line will be incorporated into RAID Inc.'s suite of storage solutions for the high performance computing (HPC), government, research and corporate markets. HPC and government organizations are increasingly demanding the data integrity and performance previously found only in the most expensive storage solutions. Specific requirements from RAID Inc. customers include: -- the highest levels of data integrity, including read validation on SATA drives -- scalable capacity and performance across multiple servers -- high performance, particularly for sequential throughput -- high availability and self-healing capabilities -- dynamic provisioning with fine granularity and immediate useability and -- lower overall power consumption "NEC's D-Series storage products meet all of these customer demands," said Greg Morris, CEO of RAID Inc. "As more of our clients -- particularly those requiring support for scalable SATA drive solutions -- ask for these features, NEC D-Series fills a gap in our product line. Also with D-Series, we can start customers at the specific capacity level required for their immediate needs and expand one hard disk drive at a time to over 1.5 petabytes -- seamlessly and non-disruptively. We believe that for our customers, NEC D-Series provides the best data integrity with the best performance at the best price." The D-Series storage 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' needs in the most demanding data-storage environments. All products are tested and put through a burn-in/staging process which ensures customers will receive a solution designed to function as specified in their unique environment. "Leveraging OEM and channel relationships are key to any storage vendor's success in the marketplace," said Stanley Zaffos, research vice president, IT Infrastructure and Operations, Gartner. "Vendors using OEM relationships for some or all of their product portfolio need to demonstrate a long-term ability to manage OEM relationships and deliver identifiable value to their customers in order to succeed." "NEC's growth strategy involves building strong relationships with the top OEMs in a vertical market," said Karen Dutch, vice president of Advanced Storage Products, IT Platform Group, NEC Corporation of America. "With RAID Inc., we now have extended reach into the HPC and government markets through a trusted advisor who delivers strong technical expertise and support infrastructure to their customers." NEC's D-Series Enterprise Modular Storage brings together the best attributes of modular storage and enterprise-class arrays. The D-Series products offer the scalability, performance, capacity and availability of a high-end enterprise storage solution without the initial high cost. Additionally, the D-Series storage line includes key capabilities that make the products ideally suited for HPC and government applications, including: -- SATA read verification to detect silent read errors that other arrays do not -- RAID types for extra reliability including Triple Mirror and RAID-3 Double Parity non-disruptive capacity scaling from 3 up to 144 disk drives with the ability to add one disk at a time to existing RAID groups -- automated physical resource allocation to balance workloads along with SAS/SATA intermix to map storage ability to the appropriate application tier -- NEC's patented Phoenix self-healing technology to reduce the number of hard disk drive rebuilds by up to 50 percent and -- MAID technology for reduced power consumption. The D-Series can start as small as 219GB and scale to over 1.5PB -- all non-disruptively -- and supports a mix of SAS and SATA hard disk drives and a wide range of RAID configurations. D-Series arrays also offer the full range of enterprise software options, including replication, snapshots, energy conservation and compliance.