NEC has announced the imminent arrival of its grid storage system which it claims will remove the need for planned downtime, amongst other things.

Called the HYDRAstor NEC's platform promises easier management, "near limitless scalabilty", no bottlenecks, simple data migration and no doubt the moon on a sharp, pointy stick.

This HYDRA's talents don't end there. NEC also claims the system, if geographically spread, will do away with the need for a disaster recovery system.

NEC says the product is aimed at medium to very large data centres. It will ship in the second half of 2007.

The official announcement is available, as a pdf.here.

For all its claims of chaging lanscapes, NEC is yet to convince as a storage heavyweight. The firm doesn't show up in IDC's top five external storage vendors®