Releases

posted on 04 April 2008 11:09

Santa Clara, Calif. - April 1, 2008 - NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today announced that Anderson Center for Autism, one of the nation's oldest and most respected non-profit schools, has purchased NEC HYDRAstor™ HS8 grid storage to address its storage backup and archive challenges.

Anderson Center for Autism has deployed NEC HYDRAstor to upgrade the school's backup environment and create an archiving solution on a single platform.

Backing up, archiving, accessing, and protecting data was previously a nightmare for Anderson Center for Autism. Their backup solution was antiquated with white box servers, tape drives, and thousands of tapes that were time consuming and unreliable. In addition, Anderson Center for Autism has nearly a million paper documents in boxes stored in trailers and basements. Meeting compliance requirements often meant employees had to trudge through snow drifts or encounter rats' nests while physically digging through mountains of critical data to retrieve documents.

Further compounding the architectural issues of their previous backup and archive solution, Anderson Center for Autism had entered a period of high growth that continues today with plans to expand services, facilities and housing to meet accelerating customer needs.

"It was critical that we find a backup and archive storage solution that not only addressed today's problems, but would be able to address the needs of our rapidly growing organization as well," said Gregg Paulk, director of Information Technologies for Anderson Center for Autism. "We wanted a solution that was cost effective, highly reliable, fast and efficient. And, we wanted de-duplication. HYDRAstor met all of these needs."

Since the initial partnership with NEC, Anderson Center for Autism's backup data has more than doubled, yet Anderson Center for Autism's backup times have been significantly reduced. Additional results have been phenomenal:

Cost-effective - The cost to Anderson Center for Autism is under $0.70 per GB.

Reliable and redundant - When testing the system, Anderson Center for Autism literally pulled the plug to create a 25% resource loss and the system kept running without interrupting backups or restores and no data was lost.

Not a single backup has ever failed.

Fast backup and restore - Backup windows have been reduced from 60 hours to six hours - a 90% improvement - and with twice as much data on twice the amount of servers than before deploying HYDRAstor.

Enterprise de-duplication - Anderson is getting a 39:1 de-duplication ratio. Beyond a great de-duplication ratio, Anderson Center for Autism has noted that HYDRAstor delivers industry leading scope, performance and protection.

Scope - HYDRAstor de-duplicates backup and archive data on a single platform.

Performance - Both the de-duplication ratio and performance has continued to increase over time.

Protection - As demonstrated when they pulled the plug to test protection, Anderson Center for Autism found that HYDRAstor offers 300 percent more protection than RAID5 with similar storage overhead.

Easy to install - The entire HYDRAstor solution was installed and running in 68 minutes.

Additional benefits that Anderson Center for Autism has appreciated are:

- Scalability - Nodes can be added on the fly without downtime to scale both capacity and performance.
- Incredible resiliency - Anderson Center for Autism tested the system by bringing down 25% of the nodes and still successfully completed backup and restore.
- Granular, easy, flexible management - HYDRAstor has an excellent GUI and Anderson Center for Autism has been able to choose between setting up one large backup job or multiple granular jobs. Data resiliency using Distributed Resilient Data technology can be set based on data value to provide flexible protection for de-duplicated data.
- Superior customer service - Anderson Center for Autism has acknowledged NEC for both the best response time of all their support teams and direct interface to an extremely knowledgeable engineering team.

"To transform its IT department, Anderson Center for Autism needed to efficiently manage its information growth and improve data protection," said Karen Dutch, vice president, Advanced Storage Products Group, NEC Corporation of America. "NEC HYDRAstor was a perfect fit for a progressive, service-oriented organization like Anderson Center for Autism. The product not only offers a great de-duplication ratio, but also provides a strategic grid platform that can seamlessly grow with their business needs and uniquely provides better protection, scope, and performance, so that the quality and reach of the education Anderson Center for Autism offers can continue to improve and grow."

Anderson Center for Autism continues to work with NEC through additional phases of their IT infrastructure transformation and growth. They are now in the process of updating their archive system on NEC HYDRAstor.

"Committing to NEC beyond being a beta tester was a simple decision to make due to our amazing results with HYDRAstor's cost-effectiveness, efficiency, reliability and speed," said Paulk. "Having NEC's revolutionary grid storage system has enabled us to become a more efficient organization, utilizing cutting edge technology to help the school serve children and adults more effectively."

For more information about NEC's grid storage platform, HYDRAstor, visit www.hydrastor.com.

About NEC Corporation of America
NEC Corporation of America is a leading technology provider of network, IT and identity management solutions. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, NEC Corporation of America is the North America subsidiary of NEC Corporation. NEC Corporation of America delivers technology and professional services ranging from server and storage solutions, IP voice and data solutions, optical network and microwave radio communications to biometric security, virtualization and digital cinema solutions. NEC Corporation of America serves carrier, SMB and large enterprise clients across multiple vertical industries. For more information, please visit http://www.necam.com.

About Anderson Center for Autism
Anderson Center for Autism (ACA) provides services to 138 students and 57 adults on the autism spectrum, with staff of 540. Backed with a longstanding tradition and history of support that spans more than 80 years, ACA relies on its expert team, evidence-based approach to treatment, compassionate care, and more to provide a safe, comfortable and enriching environment that promotes countless opportunities for LIFELONG LEARNING^SM.

For more information, please visit: http://www.andersoncenterforautism.org.

^{[Formatted by Majid Soltani.]}