News

posted on 07 July 2008 14:50

US Storage systems supplier RAID Inc., is using NEC's D-Series drive arrays for sales of highly scalable arrays with enhanced data integrity to the HPC, government, research and corporate markets.

RAID will rebadge the D-Series enterprise modular products. It says the high-performance computing (HPC) and other markets it serves need highly scalable systems, read integrity validation, dynamic provisioning and lowered power consumption. Customer input to RAID said that silent drive failures were beginning to be encountered as more SATA drives were used. NEC's read integrity validation became an important technology.

A source familiar with the situation said neither Infortrend nor Xyratex controllers did this. 

Bob Picardi, RAID Inc.'s COO, said: "RAID Inc does hold OEM partnerships with both Infortrend and Xyratex and ships rebranded  products to our customers today. However, when working with customers who have extreme amounts of data and the critical nature of their work demands the highest level of data integrity, we turn to NEC’s D-series to address that."

Greg Morris, RAID Inc. CEO, said: “NEC’s D-Series storage products meet all of these customer demands. 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. 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 will begin with NEC's D3 model, scaling to 144TB, and include the coming D8 model with an advanced controller, which scales to 1,536 hard drives and 1.52 petabytes.

NEC Corporation of America is very pleased. Karen Dutch, its IT Platform Group Advanced Storage Products VP, said: “NEC’s growth strategy involves building strong relationships with the top OEMs in a vertical market. With RAID Inc., we now have extended reach into the HPC and government markets through a trusted advisor.”

NEC’s D-Series Enterprise Modular Storage features:

- SATA read verification to detect silent read errors,
- 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,
- Phoenix proactive checking and self-healing technology to reduce the number of hard disk drive rebuilds by up to 50 percent,
- MAID (power down) technology for reduced power consumption,
- Non-disruptive scaling from 219GB to 1.5PB with mixed SAS and SATA drives.

It's a nice OEM deal for both parties who will be hoping that RAID Inc. can now sell these systems successfully to its customers on the back of the data integrity, reduced power consumption and scalability features.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}