STORAGE

NEC Solutions (America), a premier provider of integrated solutions for the Connected Enterprise in North America, leverages its global strength in storage innovation to broaden its U.S. product portfolio by introducing two new storage disk arrays -- the S2500 midrange array and the S1500 entry-level model. Both of the new products deliver high-end features, including one of the industry's first 4-Gigabit per second (Gbps) host/server interface, a mixed Fibre Channel (FC)/Serial-ATA (SATA) environment and enhanced storage control management software to offer high-speed performance, increased availability and simplified operation. With these capabilities, NEC's new storage offerings help reduce management expenses, improve return-on-investment (ROI), and help enable organizations to be more competitive and strategic with their storage initiatives. Many small and medium-sized enterprises, work groups and departmental environments see storage as a strategic technology to overcome today's most pressing business and IT challenges. By providing a flexible architecture, the NEC S2500 and the S1500 offer complete, integrated storage solutions that leverage the most value from the information storage environment to address business continuity/disaster recovery, meet stringent regulatory compliance and email governance policies and maintain data center requirements for high availability of mission-critical systems. The S2500 and S1500 deliver tiered storage through high-speed FC disks and low-cost, high-volume SATA disks within a single cabinet. These systems deliver a cost-effective backup and archiving solution that significantly reduces the cost of disk-to-disk copying in conventional backup environments. With combined FC/SATA functionality, critical data can be stored on the FC disks and archived data can exist on the SATA disks. This offers lower cost per backup and provides an ideal solution for efficient Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). Additionally to ensure high availability, NEC offers redundancy of its main components, and its proprietary Phoenix technology, which identifies failing drives to reduce costly downtime. The new solutions also offer RAID-6 support as a standard on its SATA disks to enable continuous operation -- even in a scenario where two hard drives experience a failure. "As organizations increasingly rely on the value of business data, storage solutions need to provide reliable data protection," said Brad Nisbet, program manager for IDC. "Solutions like those from NEC that offer multiple tiers of storage within the same device enable customers to incorporate secondary, disk-based storage to enhance data protection." The S2500 and S1500 disk arrays offer a standard 4 Gbps FC support. Enabling faster data transmission, the S2500 and S1500 also provide up to 8GB and 4GB of cache memory, respectively. Additionally, NEC adds significant storage capacity to its latest models, offering up to 32.7 terabytes (TB) on the S2500 model, and 17.6 TB for the S1500. This performance and scalability is delivered in a compact three U rack -- making both solutions highly attractive for end-users. "NEC has provided us innovative products throughout the years to meet our storage and networking needs," said Tim Hunnewell, chief technology officer, MarketerNet. "In particular, NEC's new storage solution has offered us effective support for our servers and disk drives -- which allows us to service our customers better, while reducing costs through enhanced performance and throughput." Additional product differentiators are its ease of operation and management capabilities. With NEC's DynamicPool technology that allows LUN expansion during operation, simple and flexible storage management can be achieved. In addition, NEC embeds storage management software for device and service management, as well as storage control software for replication, disaster recovery, high availability and resource control functionality. "Businesses generate enormous amounts of data that is critical to their own operations as well as their customers, suppliers and partners," said Larry Sheffield, executive vice president, Solutions Platform Group, NEC Solutions America. "Understanding the connected business environment, our goal is to deliver storage solutions that offer high-end features at an affordable price allowing companies of all sizes to maximize their technology investments through implementing technology that scales to their business demands, performs at levels that exceed their customers' expectations and enhances total cost of ownership." Pricing and Availability The new systems will be available in March, and are being sold through NEC's Express Partners -- Team 1 Systems and Avnet Partner Solutions, Americas. The manufacturer's suggested list price for the NEC S1500 and S2500 storage array will start at $16,610 and $36,000, respectively.