NEC Provides Scalable SAN M700 for Virtual Environments

The M700 SAN storage from NEC Corporation is on sale in Japan as a middle to high-range storage model that is for virtualization and supports scalability.

Sales of this model are expected to expand throughout North America, Europe, Asia and greater China.

In recent years, as server virtualization and cloud computing have rapidly expanded, the volume of data flowing between all kinds of businesses has also rapidly intensified. As a result, IT administrators are concerned with improving processing performance and saving data.

"NEC’s independently developed technologies enable the M700 to provide the industry’s highest level of processing performance among middle to high-range storage, while automatically optimizing the arrangement of data within storage," said Chikara Suzuki, general manager, Storage Products Division, NEC. "Furthermore, when compared to existing models (based on NEC measurements when comparing the M500, the most recent top model of the M Series, to the M700), the improved operational efficiency and reliability of this product make it ideal for creating virtual environments, mission critical business systems and private clouds."

Key features of the M700 include:

3 times the processing performance and greater scalability than existing models
Compared to existing models, the M700 features twice the number of CPUs, 4 times the internal bus bandwidth and greater speed processing performance. it also features NEC’s independently developed RAID accelerator technologies, which process multiple input/output commands at the same time, as well as multiplexing of the internal processing of storage. As a result, this storage provides high performance, approximately 3 times that of existing models. The M700 is equipped with 48 host ports and offers 2.5 times the storage capacity of existing models, for a maximum of 2.2PB. As a result, it is able to connect to multiple servers for capacity storage.

Improved operational efficiency from automatically optimized data arrangement
An optional ‘optimized data arrangement function’ automatically transfers block units of data to the most suitable storage field in response to access frequency and data characteristics. This enables automatic optimization and improved operational efficiency, even for systems that combine multiple characteristics, including systems where different capabilities are required for virtualized areas.

Secure erase function based on methods defined by the U.S. Department of Defense
Internal storage data can be erased using methods based on those defined by the U.S. Department of Defense. This is a security disk data erasure technique based on the U.S.  Department of Defense’s DOD5220.22-M disk erasure method.This option provides users with added security that is free from the risk of leaking information due to failure to erase data, which is a possibility for data center operators that reuse storage.