NEC's open source play in storage market
NEC's open source play in storage market
NEC Business Solutions is making an aggressive push into the mid-range storage and network space, launching a range of new products including open source supported SAN and tape storage products and a mission critical IP platform.
NEC Business Solutions (NECBS) has allied with open-source software vendor, FalconStor Software to launch new SAN and tape storage products with open-source software, which NEC claims can reduce implementation costs by 30 per cent.
David Henderson, NECBS storage and servers national manager and former Tech Pacific executive told Image & Data Manager that demand is growing in the small to medium enterprise (SME) market for storage area networks and price will be the critical differentiator between storage vendors. Mr Henderson added that IP storage is gaining speed and NEC will be ready when it takes off.
On the issue of NEC's competitors, Mr Henderson said NECBS is "head to head" technology-wise with the major storage technology players, such as EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi Data Systems, but he is confident NEC's price and value proposition will appeal to the mid-range market and following an open source path is part of that proposition.
NECBS, which claims to be the first non-proprietary open-source storage vendor in the marketplace, said it has taken the open source route in response to a demand for data capacity and data management from budget-restricted IT departments. According to NECBS, non-proprietary systems have kept costs high, even as data volumes soar.
"Our alliance with FalconStor means that we are the first company in Australia to deliver a non-proprietary storage range, rather than locking the customer in and inflating costs. As a result, we can configure our solution with any hardware or software, with less legacy integration, which cuts costs dramatically and opens up the enterprise-scale storage option to the increasingly data-heavy SMB market."
Through the alliance, NECBS launched the NECS 1200 entry disk array model that accommodates up to 4TB and the NEC S2200 mid-range disk array with a capacity of up to 28TB. The two new storage area network (SAN) products are aimed at both entry and mid-range disk array options. NECS 1200 entry disk array model accommodates up to 4 terabytes, and the NEC S2200 mid-range disk array delivers a capacity of up to 28 terabytes.
NECBS' storage platform uses both IP and Fibre Channel infrastructure, depending on the customer's preference. Both the new SAN and Tape systems and existing network attached storage (NAS) solutions are based upon NECBS' Express 5800 server range, which includes blade and fault tolerant solutions launched in September, but in turn can be hardware agnostic.
David Thrum, regional director, Australia and New Zealand, FalconStor Software added his assent to the alliance, saying the two companies "share the same philosophy that open source is a better choice for the customer".
"A true solution is one that fits your current infrastructure, not one that you have to fit yourself to," Mr Thrum said.
"Storage administrators of any size enterprise can now use our two products to build and utilise a more efficient and cost-effective SAN, while meeting their growing data requirements in Open SAN environments," he said.
NEC also unveiled the IPS DM, an IP enterprise platform with remote survivability for distributed enterprise architecture, which NECBS director David Haynes said will play a role bringing IP telephony into mainstream business.
"It's a fact of life that carrier networks occasionally fail. NEC Business Solutions believes that remote survivability should support the entire range of communications functions rather than just dial tone, and we're the first to achieve this standard," Mr Haynes said.
"Organisations such as emergency services with mission-critical functions can now consider making the move to IP with real confidence." The IPS DM shares all the features of the NEAX 2000 IPS communication platform including traditional 99.999 per cent reliability, integrated wireless communications, ISDN networking, malicious call trace, integrated voicemail and support for an integrated data router.
"The IPS DM is particularly suited to environments of data infrastructure from multiple vendors and in environments that want to transition to IP telephony," Mr Haynes said.
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