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NEC Plans US Storage Push: Page 2 of 4

“We will be introducing that into the [U.S] market in the fall -- there were a couple of features that we wanted to add to the product for the U.S market,” says Dutch, but she would not reveal what these are. “It will be sold as an OEM through RAID, and we will be selling it as an NEC-branded product as well.”

Whereas NEC’s D3 competes with Xyratex’s RAID family and EMC’s low-end Clariion CX-3 offerings, the D8 will be up against DataDirect’s S2A9550 and 9900 and Xiotech’s recently launched Emprise 7000.

The D8 may have its work cut out at the high end of the U.S. SAN market, where NASA is an established DataDirect customer and Xiotech is touting its Emprise systems’ Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology as a high-performance alternative to traditional RAID controllers.

Xiotech, for example, has already been awarded a contract by The Cooperative Purchasing Network, which will sell the Emprise systems to U.S. government agencies, and recently announced the systems’ first two enterprise customers -- Argus Information & Advisory Services and Forbes Energy Services.

Undeterred, NEC says that it has already gained a foothold in the U.S. market for its D-Series family thanks to its existing OEM deals in the broadcast and video editing industries.