NEC and EMC Deliver New Storage System for Medium-Small Businesses Through Strategic Alliance

Tokyo, Japan, Jan 9, 2008 - (JCN Newswire) - NEC Corporation and EMC Corporation today launched a new jointly developed networked storage system. The system marks the first result in data storage of the strategic alliance formed by the companies in April last year. NEC and EMC collaborated on elements of product development, and NEC will manufacture the product for sale by both companies on a worldwide basis. NEC will market the new product as iStorage E1, while EMC will sell the system worldwide as the EMC(R) CLARiiON(R) AX4 and in Japan as the EMC CLARiX(R) AX4.

At less than one million yen, the new system represents groundbreaking entry-level storage, provides high levels of flexibility, scalability and ease-of-use, and is designed for small and medium-sized enterprises or businesses expanding their information infrastructure into branch offices.

Leveraging the benefits of the joint collaboration, NEC intends to expand its storage product line, iStorage, and to reduce production costs through joint development and increased production, as well as global expansion. Through its strategic alliance with NEC, EMC aims to increase its worldwide market share in entry-level and SMB storage.

iSCSI[1] allows users to use existing Ethernet, making networking and operation easier and more economical compared to a conventional system using Fibre Channel. Due to its outstanding cost-effective performance and high operability, use of iSCSI is expected to increase rapidly in both Japan and abroad. In light of this, both NEC and EMC plan to introduce new iSCSI solutions through extensive marketing.

The new product can be connected to up to 64 servers. It will also support heterogeneous OS environments, which would include Windows (R), Linux (R), UNIX (R), and VMware ESX servers (R), allowing flexible scalability. Furthermore, the new product can also be connected with servers including applications such as Microsoft Exchange (R), Microsoft SQL Server (R), Oracle and SAP. In addition, the new product can mount up to 60 SAS or SATA hard disk drives, allowing it to be optimized for business areas where unstructured data, such as documents or images, is expected to increase. The product also realizes high availability and data protection capabilities by the two-layered controllers.

Starting with this new product, NEC and EMC will continue to collaborate on future storage products that will benefit their customers worldwide.

[1] iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface)
This is a communication protocol that allows computers to connect to storage devices using an IP network. In the future, it will be possible to construct a Storage Area Network (SAN) based on iSCSI that uses Fiber Channel over the Ethernet of a company's LAN.
* EMC, CLARiiON and CLARiX are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.