NEC of America, is betting advancements in nondisruptive
storage area network (SAN) scalability will help the company
carve out more market share in North America where it's still a
relatively unknown player.
NEC's D-Series storage systems, launched this week, scale from
219 GB to 1.152 petabytes (PB) -- via upgrades that can be made
while the systems remain online, the company claims. The D-Series
also scales from 2 GB to 128 GB of cache, from four to sixty-four 4
gigabytes per second (GBps) Fibre Channel ports, and from three to
1,156 disk drives. It supports
Fibre Channel on the front end, and SAS and SATA drives on the
back end.
This scalability from a very low entry point to a large
configuration in a single footprint is what differentiates NEC from
its competition, according to Brad Nisbet, senior analyst of
storage systems at IDC. "EMC and others have more of a defined
separation between their midtier and high-end systems … Clariion
vs. DMX from EMC; DS4000 and DS8000 from IBM," he said. "Some users
might be squeamish at the idea of one product that can do it all …
many are comfortable knowing that these products over here are for
high-end apps and these over here are for low-end and midtier apps,
but the industry is moving in the direction of ultimate
scalability," he said.
NEC has built-in redundancy features to the D-Series for users
that require it. The product is available in five models. The
D8-1010, D8-1020 and D8-1040 offer nondisruptive upgrades, while
the D1-10 and D3-10 require offline upgrades. All systems support
RAID Triple Mirror (RAID-TM) in the event of two disk drive
failures, as well as RAID-6 along with double-mirrored cache.
John Oakes, vice president of technology at Revenue Management
Solutions, a statistical modeling company in the restaurant and
hospitality industry, uses NEC's older S-Series storage, introduced
a year ago. Oakes bought a 10 terabyte (TB) S-Series in Oct. 2006,
instead of buying a new SAN-attached Network Appliance Inc.
(NetApp) filer. Revenue Management Solutions uses NEC's Itanium
servers to run its databases, and when it came to upgrading to SQL
2005, the company realized it needed more capacity, as well as
processing. "NEC pushed us to look at its storage," Oakes said.
At the time, NetApp's filers were still supporting 2 Gbit Fibre
Channel where NEC supported 4 Gbit, but more importantly, Oakes had
been disappointed with NetApp's claims about data in-place
upgrades. "You are supposed to be able to swap out drives, but in
practice it's not the advantage they said … we would have been
better off buying a whole new filer instead of trying to do the
swap out," Oakes said. When NEC approached the company with its
storage systems, Oakes was ready to take a look. "We've been very
happy with their technology."
One limitation he sees, still not addressed in the new D-Series
systems, is support for iSCSI. "We have lots of systems we'd like
to connect to the SAN, but they are not worth the Fibre
infrastructure." Specifically, Revenue Management Solutions has Web
servers and Exchange servers that failover and require shared
storage but only need a gigabit connection. NEC said iSCSI is on
the roadmap but would not disclose when it will be available.
Pricing for the D-Series starts at $15,000 for the D1-10,
$26,000 for the D3-10 and for the D8-Series prices range from
$43,000 to $153,000. Systems will not be available until the end of
the summer.
NEC has its work cut out driving its market share in North
America. "It's going to be a long, slow road," Nisbet said. IDC has
not yet begun to track NEC's shipments in North America as the
numbers are too small. "It's getting there," Nisbet said.