GLOBAL STORAGE LEADER NEC ELIMINATES RISKS WITH BOLD 30-DAY GUARANTEE
No Hassle, No Risk, No Questions; NEC Will Cover De-Installation, Return Freight AND Data Migration Off System if Customer Not Satisfied

NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, is rolling out a bold new storage sales initiative in North America.  NEC is known globally as a top five storage vendor with more than 50 years of delivering highly reliable, scalable, efficient storage solutions that provide the utmost value.  The company is seeking to aggressively expand their North American market share by offering a 30-day, no questions asked, unconditional satisfaction guarantee to first time customers of NEC D-Series Storage.  In this economic climate, customers are seeking innovative alternatives to improve efficiencies and meet growing data storage needs through unfamiliar vendors.  The guarantee allows customers to make a new choice for an established innovator they may not already know while eliminating the risk.

“Contrary to what people often assume, storage is a strategic purchase. Customers feel comfortable buying from whom they know and trust,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. “This makes it difficult to gain traction in new regions—even for vendors established as global leaders, like NEC.  Unless, like NEC, they offer a 30 day guarantee that is truly unconditional and eliminates all risk.   It is rare for a vendor to stand behind its storage like NEC is doing now.  This guarantee allows customers to try the D-Series without reservation.”

The 30-day money-back* guarantee applies to all new customers across North America who purchase any of NEC D-Series SAN storage products through September 30, 2009.  If for any reason or no reason at all, the customer decides they want to return the product, NEC will handle the entire process and cost of de-installation, return shipping, and migrating the data off the system.

“In my thirty years in the North American storage market, I can’t recall such an indomitable offer,” said Dan Diltz, vice president, Advanced Storage Products Division, NEC Corporation of America.  “We are just that confident in our product!  Our customers tell us we provide the most productive value with the functionality they need at a price they can afford.”

NEC Distributors, Resellers Enthusiastic
Peter J. Prieto, resident, nDataStor, Inc., added, "NEC D-Series storage has always been a solid solution because of the system's dependability and performance. With organizations facing shrinking budgets and increased data storage requirements, this iron-clad guarantee will help nDataStor introduce our customers to the value of NEC."
Steve Ichinaga, senior vice president and general manager, Systems Integration at SYNNEX Corporation, said, “Eliminating the perception of risk is a smart move from NEC.  Since our core customer set is the SMB, we have a lot of customers who are trying to do more with a smaller budget and want to try different innovative solutions that meet their critical business needs.  NEC is an established vendor that provides the innovation, financing, and value organizations need to address data growth and this ‘no risk’ money-back guarantee is proof.”


NEC, a major player on the global IT scene for more than four decades, now shipping a new series of modular disk arrays that can scale to more than a petabyte with zero downtime.

NEC Corporation of America’s D-Series arrays are available in five versions: The D8-1010, D8-1020, and D8-1040 provide a non-disruptive upgrade path for medium-to-large enterprises through NEC’s unified modular-monolithic design; the D1-10 and D3-10, which require offline upgrades, are targeted at SMBs.

* D8-1040: Four-node configuration with up to 64 Fibre Channel ports, 1,536 SAS/SATA disk drives, and 128GB of cache memory;
* D8-1020: Midrange model with two nodes and up to 32 Fibre Channel ports, 768 SAS/SATA drives, and 64GB of cache;
* D8-1010: Single-node array with up to 16 Fibre Channel ports, 384 SAS/SATA drives, and a 32GB cache;
* D1-30: Entry-level model for SMBs or departments with up to 12 Fibre Channel ports, 144 SAS/SATA disks, and 4GB of cache; and
* D1-10: Low-end model with four Fibre Channel ports, 72 SAS/SATA disk drives, and 2GB of cache.

Beyond the non-disruptive upgrade capability, NEC also packed the D-Series with a number of technologies for maintaining high-availability for business continuity purposes. For example, RAID Triple Mirror combines random access performance with continuous operation in the event of two drive failures. The D-Series also supports traditional RAID-6 technology.

The D-Series arrays can be configured with SAS and/or SATA drives, allowing users to implement tiered storage within a single array.

NEC is also bringing another patented technology to bear with the D-Series in the form of Phoenix, a self-diagnosing disk recovery technology that can reduce drive degradation by up to 50% and cutting the need to do rebuilds.

The disk arrays also features double redundant (four) power supplies, and double-mirrored cache to maintain high response rates in the event of a cache failure.

 

NetApp discontinues SMB storage line

NetApp Inc. quietly notified users via its online support forums over the weekend that it will discontinue its S-family -- previously known as StoreVault -- entry-level storage products.

NetApp issued the following statement to customers of its S family products, which read in part:

 

For your information and planning, this notice is meant to inform you about some NetApp products that have come to the end of their availability and/or some products that are no longer available from our suppliers.

This notice announces end of availability of S family/S550 systems. Starting with the March 2009 release of eConfigurator in CE/PE, the S family/S550 systems will no longer be available for quoting and sale. Actual last quote, order and ship date will be limited to quantity-available-on-hand for S family/S550 systems. Date subject to change without prior notice.

Suggested alternatives for S family/S550 systems:

 

FAS2020 systems are the ideal alternative replacements for the S family / S550 systems.

NetApp will launch new FAS2020 bundles to target the MSE market. These bundles will be available through our channel partners in February 2009 and will readily address S-family customers' requests within midsize businesses for additional product features and cost-effective price/performance.

NetApp said it will continue to support S550 hardware through 2012 should users choose to keep the product. Customers can purchase up to three years of warranty and support extension. NetApp is also offering users of the S550 an upgrade program to FAS2020 entry-level configurations. The S550 replaced the S500 and S300 products a year ago.

 

Storage: “Content Depots” to soak up Unstructured Data

IDC has coined a new term called “content depot“, defining it as a central enterprise repository set up specifically for managing the rapidly growing amounts of unstructured data. The content depot is often separated from the central enterprise data center.

The content depot is the hub for digital content/data gathered by the enterprise. IDC reports that 17.4% of disk storage capacity goes
toward creation of “content depots”, but “content depot” spending accounts for only 5.1% of all storage dollars. IDC is expecting that content depots will only continue to grow in size and importance.

Businesswire quotes Richard L. Villars, vice president of Storage Systems research at IDC as saying:
“By the end of 2008, content depots are poised to become major consumers of storage capacity, major influencers of new storage systems design, and major disruptors of existing storage systems business models. More so, many traditional organizations will evaluate the adoption of similar storage solutions for new applications that archive large amounts of unstructured data.”

IDC is calling on storage vendors to help relieve the storage growth pains that customers are feeling by doing the following:

  • Improving data access rates, server provisioning, data reliability, and energy consumption with new HDD and solid state storage technologies
  • Adding significant compute capacity on storage platforms (serverization)
  • Delivering cluster file systems and supporting information management facilities for organizing, discovering, and managing large unstructured data archives

 

Storage: Data Growth Outpacing the Reach of Compliance

A Forrester report on data archiving finds that enterprises are falling behind. Data is growing at 50% per year for the majority of companies and even faster for some vertical industries like financial institutions. The dramatic growth is driven by compliance requirements, data warehousing and business analytics applications, and the increased availability of video and images.

The Forrester Report highlights include:

  • 85% of data is never retrieved after archiving
  • 50% annual growth is reported in online transactional data and repositories
  • 27% of enterprises have 50 or more terabyte production databases
  • 64% of enterprises have over half of their databases on costly tier 1 storage
  • 20% of data center infrastructure dollars go towards data storage

The problem is compounded by the need to determine how best to archive data to support the applications that may later need to retrieve the data. Data from transactional databases, data warehousing and business analytics all have different purposes and are stored in different longterm formats.

John Bantleman of Forrester said that “Forrester’s research clearly illustrates the need for the new generation of archive stores. These deliver both massive reductions in storage footprints, through data compression, together with the security, immutability and point-in-time query capability that enables quick, simple and unimpeachable fulfilment of regulatory obligations.”