IRVING, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider and integrator of advanced IT and communications solutions, today announced that its HYDRAstor™ deduplicating backup appliances captured the top “Best-in-Class” ranking, as well as four of the top five “Recommended” rankings in DCIG, LLC’s 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide.

DCIG is an analyst firm focusing on archive, backup, retrieval and storage systems, as well as information management and data security. For its newest DCIG 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide, DCIG evaluated more than 45 offerings from 10 companies. After completing an initial questionnaire, the capabilities of participating companies were assessed based on both the questionnaire as well as information available in the public domain. Solutions were then evaluated for more than 100 characteristics, and weighted after conversations with end-users. Solutions were assessed and ranked either “Best-in-Class,” “Recommended,” “Excellent,” “Good,” or “Basic” across functionality and capability relative to the overall market landscape.

NEC HYDRAstor HS8-4000 and HS8-3000 models earned DCIG’s overall top “Best-in-Class” designation, and also captured four of the top five rankings. HYDRAstor also earned the top “Best-in-Class” ranking and all top five rankings in the Hardware category. HYDRAstor appliances achieved these high rankings by offering the top Hardware rankings, as well as most scalable hardware among the appliances that DCIG evaluated. Other features that contributed to NEC earning the high rankings included HYDRAstor’s global deduplication and modular scale-out architecture. Organizations can leverage HYDRAstor’s scale-out architecture to start with only as much capacity and performance as needed, but scale capacity to over 7.9PB and performance to over 1 PB/hr non-disruptively by adding nodes to their existing configuration.

“DCIG created its Buyer’s Guides to provide an objective third-party evaluation from an end-user’s perspective,” said Gideon Senderov, director, Advanced Storage Products, NEC Corporation of America. “Having HYDRAstor recognized as the top Best-in-Class Overall ranking of the latest 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide is a testament to NEC’s continued focus on delivering high quality and innovative products and solutions for Enterprises. We will continue to push the envelope on functionality and performance and further solidify HYDRAstor’s leading position as the top enterprise solution available in the market.”

According to DCIG, IT managers have increasingly turned to viable and cost-effective Purpose Built Backup Appliances (PBBAs) to control the explosion of data, which is reaching limits that are hard to imagine. As noted in DCIG’s latest midrange deduplicating backup report, what makes PBBAs even more attractive is the inclusion of mainstream deduplication technology. Deduplication usage continues to gain prominence for its ability to reduce data footprints and allow end users to put more data on disk. Making the use of disk for data protection is more economical, and in many cases, accelerates recovery times.

“It should come as no surprise that end users are struggling to manage the ever-growing volumes of data and need as many ways that are economically feasible to handle managing, protecting and backing up data,” said Jerome Wendt, president and lead analyst, DCIG, LLC. “That is why we are not surprised that PBBAs are gaining in adoption. Any end user looking for a smarter way to address the problem of runaway storage volumes is looking at backup appliances, especially those that feature deduplication. The NEC HYDRAstor deduplicating backup appliances exemplify the feature-rich capabilities that today’s solutions need to offer which contributed to its HYDRAstor HS8-4006R-720 achieving ‘Best-in-Class’ rankings both overall and in the hardware category of this Buyer’s Guide.”

The intent for this Buyer’s Guide, as with all DCIG Buyer’s Guides, is to provide an “at-a-glance” comparison from which end users can select the most appropriate solution for their existing needs. This Buyer’s Guide also provides perspective on how solutions from less well known storage providers compare against established and better known brands.

Products, such as NEC’s HYDRAstor storage solution, that earned “Best-in-Class” and “Recommended” rankings generally shared the following features in common:

• Provide organizations two options to encrypt data
• Have starting list prices of more than $250,000
• Scale to at least 100TBs in raw capacity with scaling to more than 700TBs
• Scale to support dozens of concurrent backup streams with no performance degradation
• Scale to support hundreds of GBs for cache

More information on NEC’s HYDRAstor storage products can be found at www.necam.com/HYDRAstor/.

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