NEC Updates HYDRAstor for Long-Term Storage Archive
HYDRAstor self-evolving storage enhanced for long-term archive with WORM support, in-flight data encryption; performance increased by 67 percent
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NEC Corporation of America has announced archive enhancements to its grid storage platform, HYDRAstor, that enhance its cost effectiveness for long-term data retention and online data access. These enhancements, combined with HYDRAstor's self-evolving capabilities, ease forklift upgrades and data migration required to store and access data over decades. In addition, this release boosts HYDRAstor performance by 67 percent.
HYDRAstor is designed to be “future-evolving,” enabling newer generation nodes to work seamlessly with older generation nodes to allow the storage grid to evolve with denser, faster technologies without having to start a new grid system and without data migration, provisioning, forklift upgrades, application downtime, or data loss. This capability can save an organization a significant amount of money in downtime, migration, and reconfiguration costs over decades of data retention and retrieval.
New Archive Features Further Complement HYDRAstor's Self-Evolving Capability
The latest HYDRAstor update improves flexibility, granularity, efficiency and scalability, and features with several archive extensions.
- HYDRAlock, HYDRAstor's new Write Once Read Many (WORM) capability, prevents the accidental or intentional erasing or altering of documents, e-mail, and other corporate records. By eliminating the lifespan limitations inherent to other WORM devices, HYDRAlock ensures the authenticity of critical data while maintaining the chain of custody for regulated business environments.
- HYDRAstor now features greater file system granularity for Distributed Resilient Data (DRD) protection, supporting an intermix of multiple resiliency classes and dynamically configurable tradeoffs between the level of protection and associated capacity overhead across different applications.
- Integrated, in-flight data encryption protects data from unauthorized access while data is replicated between independent grids. In addition to built-in data protection and automatic distribution while at rest, HYDRAstor offers the option to encrypt sensitive data while in flight during replication to another grid with RepliGrid WAN-optimized asynchronous replication.
- HYDRAstor now provides configurable control over the maximum effective capacity allocated for each file system and its associated application. With quota management and support for both hard and soft quotas with threshold notifications, HYDRAstor offers the ability to contain storage capacity consumption to reserve sufficient capacity for other applications such as critical archive data.
NEC has also boosted HYDRAstor performance by 67 percent. With the new software enhancements and more efficient inter-node data transfer and communication, existing HS8-2000 grids can now deliver up to 1.8 TB per hour per Accelerator Node and up to 90 TB per hour for the largest supported configuration of 55 Accelerator Nodes and 110 Storage Nodes.
The latest HYDRAstor software now offers enhanced application-aware deduplication for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC NetWorker backup applications in addition to previously existing support for CommVault Simpana and Symantec NetBackup. HYDRAstor's global deduplication already cuts storage capacity needs by 95 percent or more across the enterprise and delivers up to 50 percent more efficient deduplication than siloed appliances whose deduplication scope is limited to the physical and logical boundaries of each appliance. Application-aware deduplication delivers even greater space reduction ratios and more efficient capacity optimization.
Finally, logical capacity can be expanded for an ancillary fee at a later time without requiring any physical components be added to the system. This capability provides organizations with more flexible and granular growth options.
NEC is introducing new, lower-capacity models of HYDRAstor in 12TB raw capacity (over 150 TB effective capacity); 24TB (over 300 TB effective capacity); and 36 TB (over 450 TB effective capacity) configurations. These entry-level configurations are ideal for organizations suffering from high secondary data growth and constrained budgets but want or need to take advantage of the long-term efficiencies and savings of HYDRAstor's self-evolving capabilities. Using the new capacity-on-demand feature, additional capacity can be licensed without adding any components to the system.
The latest version of HYDRAstor is available now. For more information about HYDRAstor, visit www.necam.com/HYDRAstor.