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•Contributing Editorial: Data Loss On SATA-Based Storage Systems

By Jerome M. Wendt, DCIG LLC

Whether or not to recommend users deploy SATA-based storage systems remains one of my more frustrating tasks as an analyst. On one hand, I want to encourage companies to use storage systems that use SATA disk drives because they are economical, meet the availability requirements for many corporate applications and have reliability ratings that are on paper are arguably as good as, if not better than, FC and SCSI/SAS drives. What prevents me from doing so is that, having worked in enterprise organizations, these same companies many times have unforgiving mission-critical application requirements and the last thing I want to do is encourage companies to deploy SATA-based storage systems that fail in some key area.

This point was brought home to me in a recent joint briefing that I received from NEC's vice president of Advanced Storage Products, Karen Dutch, and RAID Inc.'s COO, Robert Picardi. The purpose of the briefing was to discuss the new OEM agreement announced today between NEC and RAID Inc. RAID Inc. will be reselling NEC's D-Series storage systems as its Xanadu storage system line to its HPC (high performance computing) and government markets. However what's more interesting is the story behind the headline and what prompted the necessity for this OEM relationship in the first place.

I was first briefed on the NEC D-Series about a year ago and was, at that time, impressed by its breadth of functions and scalability. However it then promptly and curiously disappeared from view (as has happened before with other computing products offered by NEC) such that I largely forgot about the D-Series product line. Then last week the D-Series re-appears out of the blue in conjunction with the announcement of an OEM relationship with RAID Inc. In my mind, this did not make sense. Why does someone like RAID Inc. take a chance with a relatively unknown product in the US storage market when it can partner with any number of existing and established storage system providers?

Click Here To Download:
•Contributing Editorial: Data Loss On SATA-Based Storage Systems