RAID announced this week that it will OEM disk-based products from NEC and sell them under the RAID Xanadu brand.

The company will market NEC's D-Series Etherprise Modular Storage products, which scale to over 1.5 petabytes and nearly double the capacity of RAID’s existing arrays.

RAID sells primarily to high-performance computing, government, research and enterprise size markets that need the highest level of data integrity and high performance. Some of these markets require read validation on Serial ATA drives and particularly high sequential throughput.

With the D-Series, expansion can occur one disk drive at a time, non-disruptively. Serial ATA read verification is performed to detect silent read errors that other arrays do not and data may be striped with RAID Triple Mirror and RAID-3 Double Parity. The D-Series array scales from 3 to 144 disk drives.

In addition, the drives support Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA intermix as well as Phoenix self-healing technology, which reduces the number of hard disk drive rebuilds by 50%. Further, they support MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology, where disks are spun down based on policies the IT manager sets.

D-Series arrays start as small as 219GB and scale to over 1.5PB. The D3 is a 12 port Fibre Channel to SAS/SATA array that can grow to 144 hard disk drives. The D8 is available in three models, scaling from 384 hard disks to 1,536 hard drives.

The D3 array is available now. The D8 is expected to be available later this year.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.