NEC Corporation of America, a provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, announced the addition of application-aware deduplication to its grid storage platform, NEC HYDRAstor. HYDRAstor application-aware deduplication further optimizes data deduplication efficiency by analyzing incoming data streams and filtering application level metadata to eliminate its negative impact on deduplication rates.

HYDRAstor application-aware data deduplication offers greater insight into the customer's data stream by analyzing the user data independently from application metadata, resulting in increased storage efficiency, faster backups and archiving along with reduced costs. According to benchmark tests, the addition of application-aware deduplication for specific applications improved deduplication ratios by up to 70% on incremental backups and up to 130% on complete weekly backup cycles.

"We are constantly evolving our HYDRAstor grid promise with a commitment to product excellence and customer satisfaction," says Gideon Senderov, director, product management and technical marking for NEC. "With the addition of application-aware deduplication, NEC continues to deliver storage grids with greater efficiency, performance and independent scalability to its established and growing customer base."

NEC says that HYDRAstor's global deduplication cuts data storage capacity needs by 95% or more across the enterprise and delivers up to 50% more efficient deduplication than siloed VTLs and appliances where deduplication scope is limited to the physical and logical boundaries of each appliance. The latest generation of HYDRAstor is now application-aware and optimized for CommVault Simpana and Symantec NetBackup with support for additional applications coming soon.

The addition of application-aware deduplication to the HYDRAstor storage platform is included under HYDRAstor's software maintenance agreement and is offered at no additional cost. Existing customers can immediately enjoy the benefits of higher deduplication ratios and improved efficiency, maximizing the return on their original investment.

Nodes of any generation (previous, current, or future) of HYDRAstor are designed to work together, NEC says. This heterogeneous feature of the HYDRAstor grid platform enables the storage grid to evolve with new greener, denser, faster technologies-without having to start a new grid system and without data migration, provisioning, forklift upgrades, application downtimes and data loss.

HYDRAstor with added application-aware deduplication is available now, NEC says. For more information about the HYDRAstor HS8 Series, NEC's grid storage platform, go here.