NEC Corporation of America announced that NEC HYDRAstor HS8 grid storage platform has been qualified with Symantec Enterprise Vault. NEC has worked closely with Symantec, a global leader in infrastructure software and information security, to undergo testing of HYDRAstor with Enterprise Vault to ensure interoperability, optimize performance and provide customers with an integrated enterprise archive solution on a scalable enterprise storage platform. The combination of NEC's award-winning HYDRAstor series with Symantec's intelligent archiving platform, Enterprise Vault, changes the way companies approach storage by enabling them to manage information, not just infrastructure.

"We have been using NEC's HYDRAstor to address our current backup and archiving needs as well as our expected future growth," said Gregg Paulk, director of Information Technology, Anderson Center for Autism. "The qualification of NEC HYDRAstor with Symantec Enterprise Vault gives us sophisticated options and ensure both vendor solutions run smoothly in our environments," said Paulk. "The combination of these two trusted vendors can help us to more effectively keep pace with today's exponential data growth."

The Symantec Technology Enabled Program (STEP) provides technology leaders the ability to integrate and test their products for interoperability with Symantec's broad spectrum of enterprise security, storage management, high availability and data protection solutions. As a STEP partner, NEC has been working closely with Symantec to ensure compatibility of numerous solutions including HYDRAstor with Enterprise Vault.

"Symantec backup and archive products deliver confident data protection while automating the storage, management and discovery of critical information for compliance or other business requirements," said Mathew Lodge, Symantec senior director product marketing, Enterprise Vault. "It is important for us to partner and qualify trusted storage providers such as NEC for our joint customer base."

Beyond certification with Enterprise Vault, NEC continues to conduct extensive testing with all of Symantec's backup and archive products.

"Today's increasingly stringent backup and archive requirements are driving the need for advanced storage solutions that offer enhanced flexibility and intelligence to leverage resources for better data protection, performance and scope, while reducing complexity and cost," said Karen Dutch, vice president, Advanced Storage Products, NEC Corporation of America. "Achieving qualification with Symantec Enterprise Vault enables our NEC HYDRAstor customers to more effectively reach those goals. Symantec's reputation and wide-scale deployment made it a natural choice as an NEC partner."

NEC HYDRAstor is the first unified grid storage platform optimized for both backup and archive. HYDRAstor's "community of smart nodes" is comprised of self-aware, self-healing, industry-standard servers with no single point of failure and no central resource bottleneck, enhancing the flexibility of the storage environment while reducing infrastructure complexity and management overhead. HYDRAstor offers the following unique benefits:

• Unrestricted independent linear scalability of performance and capacity
• Maximum data integrity and data protection with NEC's patented Distributed Resilient Data™ (DRD) technology providing 300% greater protection than RAID 5 with similar overhead
• Simplified management of all backup and archive storage, avoiding complex management of multiple siloed backup and archive systems
• Global deduplication for both backup and archive in a single integrated solution, delivering true enterprise deduplication across all data within the enterprise with NEC's patented DataRedux™ technology
• Natural evolution into a faster, greener, more efficient system, with seamless adoption of new technologies into existing grid through built-in transition of data onto newer technologies and off older ones without any forklift upgrades and without the need for provisioning or migration

NEC HYDRAstor is deployed using open standards of CIFS and NFS, delivering an advanced grid storage platform that reduces backup windows and archive times up to 90 percent; slashes data restore times by half; and cuts data storage needs by 95 percent or more. By implementing NEC HYDRAstor as a fast, reliable and secure standards-based, disk-to-disk platform to replace today's costly and risky tape infrastructure, NEC HYDRAstor addresses the combined needs of IT and business to provide a compelling data management solution.