NEC Adds New iSCSI Model and Thin Provisioning

NEC Corporation of America detailed why customers are choosing NEC’s D-Series SAN Storage systems resulting in a year-over-year revenue growth of 370 percent in the U.S. NEC has seen 79 percent of this U.S.-based SAN storage revenue from new customers who are seeking value over better known brand names, excessive and costly bells and whistles, or systems that sacrifice enterprise functionality for low cost.

“In a $9 billion market, we estimate companies are overpaying by approximately $3 billion a year in order to buy a brand name,” said Josh Eddy, product marketing manager, Advanced Storage Products, NEC Corporation of America. “Businesses can not and should not be overpaying for storage, nor should they have to give up functionality. NEC offers affordable, enterprise functionality and value, but we’re not well known as a storage vendor in the U.S.”

NEC has added an iSCSI model to their existing fibre channel lineup and introduced thin provisioning. In addition, they are indefinitely extending their 30-day ‘No Risk’ guarantee, announced as a special 6-month promotion in May 2009, to become part of the NEC SAN storage value proposition.

“The current economic situation is definitely driving users to carefully prioritize what they’re looking for in SANs, but it does not remove that other big concern of IT managers – risk,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “NEC may not be well known in storage but it is a very reputable brand and offers SANs with an excellent balance of features, pricing, dependability and scalability. Users looking for IT and economic efficiency may well want to try the product — and NEC’s aggressive 30-day ‘no-questions’ test period will make that decision risk-free and far easier.”

Customers Testify to NEC D-Series Value
After considering options from EMC and Dell, EDminv replaced a four-year-old EMC CLARiiON CX700 that was completely ‘maxed out’ in capacity with an NEC D3 to deliver their SaaS offering to school districts throughout the U.S. Mike Bours, chief information technology officer, EDmin stated: "We weren’t just looking at raw storage versus raw storage. While we did compare the basic costs – and NEC won on that comparison alone – when we looked at the whole package, NEC came out far ahead of the competition.”

Dedicated transportation services company, Estenson Logistics LLC is using the D-Series for data center virtualization and consolidation. Jeff Schuler, director of IT, Estenson Logistics, found that a SAN storage solution was a requirement to take their data center virtualization to the next level. Schuler stated: “We spent over a year-and-a-half looking at different SAN options and none of them offered the same value. An equally spec’d out EqualLogic system was over twice the cost of the D3i.”

Accutech Data Supplies, wholesale supplier of digital supplies and imaging products, virtualized their entire IT infrastructure on the D3i. Chris Crawford, Systems Administrator, Accutech Data Supplies was especially appreciative of NEC’s No Risk Guarantee. Crawford noted: “Until we saw the NEC device, we thought we set our budget incorrectly. We were going to accept going over our budget. Once we realized the NEC D3i offered the functionality we needed within our budget, we knew it made sense. However, vendors often make claims about what their system can do. NEC was the only vendor that would give us a chance to try the system in production first. We crammed six months worth of production testing into a month and the system really performed. It made all the difference in the world.”

East Resources, Inc., an independent oil and gas exploration and development company, chose to virtualize and consolidate their data center on the NEC D3i after looking at low-cost offerings that didn’t meet their functionality needs and well-known brands beyond their budget. Jason McNutt, IT Manager, East Resources noted: “NEC provided the right features at the right price. I dug deep and I could not find one bad word about NEC SAN Storage solution. The NEC product has impressive features comparable to EMC and Dell EqualLogic. NEC blew the competition out of the water. Now, NEC is the heart of our data center.”

TLC Engineering for Architecture uses NEC D-Series and NEC servers at each of the company’s ten regional offices for incremental backups and project collaboration via email and large file transfers. Scott Ashton, LAN/WAN specialist, TLC explained: “Deploying a complete NEC technology solution has significantly improved productivity for our company. The NEC products are very cost-effective, easily expandable and simple to manage. We considered alternative solutions, but they were far too expensive.”

Econometrics services company Revenue Management Solutions recently virtualized their internal data center using the NEC D8 and NEC enterprise servers. John Oakes, vice president, Information Technology, RMS, said: “We are a rapidly growing company. Our data processing and storage needs have grown at a faster rate than our company. It’s absolutely critical to have systems that are secure, reliable, scalable and powerful enough to keep up with our growth. We are extremely satisfied with not only NEC’s products but also the professionalism demonstrated through their support and services teams. NEC is a name we can trust.”

New iSCSI Model, Thin Provisioning

In addition to NEC’s existing fibre channel lineup, NEC’s new iSCSI model, the D3i modular storage array, is ideal for customers who want to leverage their existing network infrastructure. The NEC D3i array can scale from just 219 GB to 144 TB capacity by adding up to eleven 2U 12-drive expansion enclosures. iSCSI connectivity to hosts is provided through two or four 1-Gbps ethernet ports. The disk enclosures are connected to the controllers via SAS wide-link connection for 24 Gbps bandwidth to each disk enclosure. The system is fully redundant with no single-point-of-failure to protect against unplanned downtime. It includes the NEC-patented self-healing Phoenix technology that reduces RAID rebuilds by 35%, and also protects against silent data corruption, having implemented the T10-DIF standard and the NEC proprietary Extended Data Integrity Feature.

NEC has also added thin provisioning functionality to the D8 enabling customers to improve storage capacity utilization and budget planning.

NEC Extends 30-day No-Risk Guarantee
Since implementing the 30-day no-risk guarantee in May of 2009, NEC has earned praise from resellers and customers alike. Due to the success of this program, NEC has decided to extend the program indefinitely.

With the offering, first-time North American customers who purchase any of NEC D-Series SAN storage products receive a 30-day, no questions asked, unconditional satisfaction money-back guarantee. (Original shipping and installation services not included as part of ‘money-back’ guarantee.) If for any reason or no reason at all, the customer decides they want to return the product during that 30-day period, NEC will handle the entire process and cost of de-installation, return shipping, and migration of the data off the system. In this economic climate, customers are seeking innovative alternatives to improve efficiencies and meet growing data storage needs through vendors that are new to them. The guarantee allows customers to ensure the system from an unfamiliar vendor with a recognized name meets their needs while eliminating the risk.

NEC’s D-Series SAN Storage arrays provide highly available and easily scalable SAN storage without sacrificing performance and flexibility. They include high-end features not common to other mid-range arrays, but at a 36 to 52 percent lower cost than most brand name products. There are four models – D1, D3i, D3, and D8 – as well as a complete array management suite which includes snapshots, replication, performance management, multipathing, failover, compliance, energy conservation, and more.

NEC’s updated D-Series SAN Storage line is available now.