NEC Soft and DataCore announced the renewal of their OEM relationship under which NEC Soft builds and markets its MelodiousStor storage virtualization appliance. The growth of server virtualization vendors – VMware and Microsoft in Japan – signals that Japan is poised for broad, mainstream adoption of virtualization. NEC Soft’s Powered by DataCore solutions pair DataCore’s storage virtualization software with NEC Soft’s highly respected hardware and solution integration. These solutions are tailored to bring the additional storage flexibility, protection and performance critical to customer satisfaction when virtual machines are deployed in place of physical servers.

Atsuo Suzuki, general manager of the Platform Systems Division with NEC Soft, says, “NEC Soft has been focusing attention on virtualization technology from its market's early stages, and we have been carrying on an active business in this field.”

“Virtualization technology is drawing attention as ‘Green IT’ and is growing rapidly in Japanese market as well. NEC Soft will contribute by offering the total virtualization solution including a combination of server virtualization and virtual storage (MelodiousStor).” MelodiousStor is an appliance server based on NEC Express5800 Series IA servers and pre-installed SANmelody software.

The Power of Virtualization
Japan is moving to server virtualization. The benefits are undeniable and cannot be resisted in a competitive, global economy. It has been observed elsewhere that the rise in adoption of server virtualization causes customers to think differently about their storage. They want their storage to become as mobile and efficient as their virtual machines, and they are very interested in how they can build excellent flexibility and storage provisioning efficiency into their existing storage environments, while at the same time addressing increased requirements for storage protection, availability and performance inherent in a virtual server environment.

Based upon this experience, NEC Soft and DataCore believe that Japan’s adoption of storage virtualization will occur in parallel to its adoption of server virtualization, which is currently well underway. By combining NEC Soft’s expertise and acceptance in the Japanese market with DataCore’s storage virtualization and advanced storage management, the two companies are offering Japanese customers the opportunity to integrate into their existing storage environment important advances in thin provisioning capacity allocation, high performance data caching, high availability, disaster recovery and data migration.

NEC Soft, which through its related companies also offers VMware and Microsoft solutions, will market the DataCore, VMware and Microsoft virtual server solutions separately and as part of a Total Enterprise Virtualization solution offering.