News

posted on 09 June 2008 15:04

NEC's HYDRAstor disk-based backup and archive vault for enterprises has been qualified to work with Symantec's Enterprise Vault software.

HYDRAstor is a grid-based set of accelerator (performance) and storage nodes that provides a scalable disk-based backup and archive target. It has a 2-step Data Redux deduplication capability, first in the accelerator nodes and then in the storage nodes, followed by compression, and offers better than RAID 6 data protection, covering against three drive failures. The protection also covers against the loss of an entire storage node as data and metadata are striped across nodes.

HYDRAstor is presented as a CIFS/NFS network-attached storage (NAS) device and not a virtual tape library (VTL). The storage nodes use 500GB SATA drives and the system has a maximum 37.5TB effective capacity. Both 750GB and 1TB drives are coming which will potentially double capacity. Performance and storage capacity can be scaled independently. NEC says the system is self-healing and uses industry-standard servers with no single point of failure.

Symantec's Enterprise Vault 2007 is a software-based archiving platform that stores, manages, and enables discovery of enterprise data from e-mail systems, filer server environments, instant messaging platforms, content management and collaboration systems. NEC's HYDRAstor is an obviously suitable hardware target for it.

NEC made HYDRAstor generally available seven months ago, at a starting price of $165,000 for two accelerator and four storage nodes.  This base system has an active:active accelerator node pair for high-availability. Around two dozen systems have been sold since then.

The main idea is to provide a highly reliable single disk-based storage facility for both backup data and archive data and to deduplicate across that entire data set. Having a Symantec Enterprise Vault qualification should accelerate sales.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}