Düsseldorf, January 6, 2010 - NEC announced today that it is providing neuro-scientists at the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière (ICM), the French Brain & Spine Institute in Paris, a massive-capacity, three petabyte (*) storage solution to store research data generated by neuro and cellular imaging.

The ICM aims to understand the causes behind major nervous system disorders and offer new treatments through the collaboration of over 600 researchers. To do this, it must provide these researchers with a robust technical infrastructure capable of securely managing immense amounts of data in order to carry out their research.

“One of the key objectives of the IT team at the ICM was to ensure that the technical infrastructure – and in particular data storage – should not be a hindrance to research,” said Bruno Lecointe, Sales Manager, NEC. “NEC, along with its partner Active Circle, enabled the IT team to provide a massive-capacity, three-petabyte-storage solution that meets this objective and is fully redundant, secure and cost-effective.”

The ICM selected a software solution from Active Circle that was integrated with an intelligent SAS/SATA(**)-based, high-end solution from NEC. It provides - cost effectively - the highest level of reliability and data protection.

“We selected the high-performance computing solution proposed by NEC and Active Circle because they demonstrated an excellent level of cooperation; they listened to our requirements and proposed a solution that met our needs and expectations,” said Dominque Bayle, Chief Information Officer of the ICM - Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière.

The NEC solution has an enterprise-class, cable-less system design that includes fully redundant, hot-swapped controllers, power and cooling units. The system components are monitored using industry-standard protocols to ensure continuous operation in case of failure or component malfunction.

The solution included RAID (***) storage systems from Promise Technology equipped with Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drives configured within RAID 6 disk arrays. High-speed serial attached SCSI (****) host interfaces in fully redundant “No Single Point of Failure” system architecture meet extreme high-load requirement of input/output operations (IOPs). This combination of enterprise-class RAID storage systems with a cost-effective, 24x7-proven, SATA hard disk provides the required performance and capacity ratio.

The Active Circle software is installed on all storage nodes as a clustered file storage system with integrated security and tiered storage management. This software solution is compatible with standard hardware and is particularly well adapted to the management of large volumes of data. It natively protects against errors, corruption and disasters and allows for the implementation of a multi-tiered storage architecture.

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Note to Editors :
(*) 1 petabyte = 1048576 gigabytes
(**) SAS/SATA - Serial Attached SCSI / Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
(***) RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks
(****) SCSI - Small Computer System Interface

About ICM

L’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière (ICM) was founded in Paris by Professors Gérard Saillant, Yves Agid and Olivier Lyon-Caen. It comprises a new model in neuro-scientific research with government agencies, businesses and benefactors collaborating to bring together patients, doctors and world-leading researchers to find new treatments for neurological disorders. Previously, scientific developments in the areas of molecular and cellular neurobiology, neurophysiology, cognitive sciences and related therapies were geographically dispersed. Consolidating these activities in one place enables patients to benefit from advances from all these fields in one place: at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris the ICM occupies 22,000 m².

The Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière - ICM (Brain & Spine Institute – Paris) is a research centre of international dimensions without equivalent in the world, innovative both by design and organization. By bringing together under one roof patients, physicians and researchers, the objective is to produce rapid treatment of lesions affecting the nervous system and to apply them to patients in the speediest possible way. Coming from various horizons and all countries, the best scientists will develop cutting-edge research in this field.

www.icm-institute.org

About NEC Europe Ltd.

NEC Europe is a subsidiary of NEC Corporation, a leader in the integration of IT network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. NEC Europe is building upon its heritage and reputation for innovation and quality by providing its expertise, solutions and services to a broad range of customers, from telecom operators to enterprises and the public sector. For additional information, please visit the NEC Europe home page at: www.nec.com/eu

About Active Circle

Created in 2002, Active Circle develops and markets an innovative software-based solution that addresses the need for storing, preserving, and managing large volumes of digital content. The Active Circle software has been designed for organizations that manage video content, images, scientific and technical data, to help them better control the lifecycle of their data while at the same time keeping down the costs of storage ownership and administration.

www.active-circle.com

About Promise Technology

With a long history of innovation, Promise Technology develops and manufactures sophisticated RAID solutions recognised worldwide, ranging from a complete line of RAID controller cards to FC/iSCSI/SAS/SATA RAID subsystems. With product offerings to enterprise, mid-range, entry-level consumer data protection needs, Promise products are notable by their integrated Common RAID Core and management software and unparalleled support. Promise has operations throughout US, Asia and Europe. For more information, visit Promise Technology’s website at www.promise.com

www.promise.com