NEC Adds Application Awareness to HydraStor Deduplication

Santa Clara, Calif. - June 1, 2009 - NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today announced the addition of application-aware deduplication to NEC's future-evolving grid storage platform, NEC HYDRAstor. HYDRAstor application-aware deduplication further optimizes data deduplication efficiency by analyzing incoming data streams and filtering application level metadata to eliminate its negative impact on deduplication rates.

HYDRAstor application-aware data deduplication offers greater insight into the customer's data stream by analyzing the user data independently from application metadata, resulting in increased storage efficiency, faster backups and archiving along with reduced costs. According to benchmark tests, the addition of application-aware deduplication for specific applications improved deduplication ratios by up to 70 percent on incremental backups and up to 130 percent on complete weekly backup cycles.

"As companies continue to experience tremendous data growth, deduplication has become a must-have in backup," said analyst Lauren Whitehouse, Enterprise Strategy Group. "NEC's HYDRAstor has differentiated itself in the secondary storage market through its scale-out architecture and distributed deduplication processing. The addition of application-aware deduplication, adds another layer of optimization, enabling improved reduction ratios without any impact on performance."

HYDRAstor's global deduplication already cuts data storage capacity needs by 95 percent or more across the enterprise and delivers up to 50 percent more efficient deduplication than siloed VTLs and appliances where deduplication scope is limited to the physical and logical boundaries of each appliance. With the addition of application-aware deduplication, NEC now offers customers even greater efficiency, flexibility and cost reductions for their growing data needs. The latest generation of HYDRAstor is now application-aware and optimized for CommVault Simpana and Symantec NetBackup with support for additional applications coming soon.

"Application-aware deduplication is the smartest approach to eliminating redundant data and CommVault is working closely with NEC to offer joint customers the best solution for their backup and archiving needs," said David West, vice president of marketing and business development for CommVault. "Employing deduplication within different levels of the environment helps ensure that our customers receive the flexibility and scalability they need in a storage solution, as well as the cost and operational efficiency benefits gained from managing deduped data throughout its lifecycle."The addition of application-aware deduplication to the HYDRAstor storage platform is included under HYDRAstor's software maintenance agreement and is offered at no additional cost. Existing customers can immediately enjoy the benefits of higher deduplication ratios and improved efficiency, maximizing the return on their original investment.

"We are constantly evolving our HYDRAstor grid promise with a commitment to product excellence and customer satisfaction," said Gideon Senderov, director, product management and technical marking, NEC Corporation of America. "With the addition of application-aware deduplication, NEC continues to deliver storage grids with greater efficiency, performance and independent scalability to its established and growing customer base."

HYDRAstor is designed to be future-evolving, meaning that nodes of any generation (previous, current, or future) will work seamlessly together. This heterogeneous feature of the HYDRAstor grid platform allows the storage grid to evolve with new greener, denser, faster technologies--without having to start a new grid system and without data migration, provisioning, forklift upgrades, application downtimes and data loss. HYDRAstor's unique "community of smart nodes" enables IT to non-disruptively ride both technology and growth curves so that a single storage grid can continually evolve with greener, denser, and faster nodes.

NEC's HYDRAstor is part of NEC's Dynamic IT Infrastructure that includes servers, storage, virtual desktop solutions, and system software, which are smart, flexible, adaptive to change, scalable, resilient, and continuously evolving. Along with NEC's broad range of services, the NEC Dynamic IT Infrastructure provides an ideal platform for virtualization, consolidation and business continuity and is ideal for driving greater value and efficiencies in solutions for physical security, law enforcement, emergency response, travel and entertainment, education, high performance computing, and business. This type of infrastructure allows IT organizations to move forward confidently and meet changing and growing business needs in an efficient manner.

HYDRAstor with added application-aware deduplication is available now and will be showcased at Storage Decisions, booth 120, from June 1-2, in Chicago. For more information about the HYDRAstor HS8 Series, NEC's grid storage platform, please visit www.hydrastor.com, email [email protected], or call us toll-free at 866-NEC-FAAN (866-632-3226), international +1-408-844-1299.About NEC Corporation of America

NEC Corporation of America is a leading technology provider of network, IT and identity management solutions. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, NEC Corporation of America is the North America subsidiary of NEC Corporation. NEC Corporation of America delivers technology and professional services ranging from server and storage solutions, IP voice and data solutions, optical network and microwave radio communications to biometric security, virtualization and digital cinema solutions. NEC Corporation of America serves carrier, SMB and large enterprise clients across multiple vertical industries. For more information, please visit http://www.necam.com/dynamicIT.