Disk Based Storage – Nexsan

designs and installs Nexsan Corporation disk based storage solutions.  Nexsan is a leading provider of next generation energy efficient disk-based storage systems designed for the long-term storage of digital information. Our hardware and software systems are ideal for storing and archiving information commonly referred to as "fixed content", since it typically changes little over time. This includes medical images, email, business documents, video images, research data, and digital media of all types. Our solutions enable organizations to store and access growing amounts of fixed content over longer periods of time, while meeting evolving business and compliance requirements in a "green" environment.

With a history of both hardware and software innovation, and with many market "firsts" to its credit, Nexsan is recognized as a pioneer of reliable disk-based storage technologies optimized for capacity, energy efficiency and cost. Through our adoption and refinement of RAID, ATA and SATA disk technologies coupled with our own innovations in de-duplications, secure archiving software, and storage encryption, our products have dramatically reshaped the economics of disk-based storage. Nexsan now offers enterprise-class storage at price points up to 1/10th the cost of traditional disk-based storage solutions. Our products are the first to offer or AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks), a policy-based intelligent "green" energy saving technology. AutoMAID epitomizes the MAID 2.0 concept in which power consumption is dramatically reduced without sacrificing performance.

Since its founding in 1999, Nexsan has sold its products exclusively through a select, global network of VARs, OEMs, and system integrators and have deployed over 21,000 systems to more than 60 countries. We have installed our systems in small and medium-sized enterprises as well as large global enterprises around the world.

Key Features

• Scale: users can have anywhere from just a few TB to a massive 4 PB (and theoretically even beyond that with the DataBeast), and can scale either their capacity and/or performance attributes non-disruptively. Capacity wise, The Edge offers up to 84 TB in 9U of space and SATABeast can scale to 42 TB in 4U.
• Data Types and Protection: both block and file (NFS/CIFS) are supported, so FC SAN and NAS can be on one central system. Also available are mirroring and remote replication facilities for granular protection.
• Management and Feature Set: Nexsan offers many functions that are usually regarded as ‘Tier One’ management functions, such as virtualization, thin provisioning, tiering, and snapshots. And, just this month, Nexsan released the latest 6.0 version of its Assureon 6.0 platform, which extends its existing CAS functions by adding a federated archive architecture.
• Software Philosophy: the same software works across all Nexsan hardware platforms and is one price, one time. None of the features (such as snapshots or replication) are unexpected ‘extras;’ and there is no set of additional charges as users grow capacity and performance.
• ‘Green’: AutoMAID is Nexsan’s term for automated and graduated power-down options, which offer more flexibility than a straightforward MAID or on/off spin-down option. The fact that more and more vendors are going down this ‘green’ path only goes to show that Nexsan was right to pursue it. ESG research (see Figure 2) shows clearly that such abilities are already relevant to the majority of IT operations.    
• Affordability and Ease: Nexsan has never been shy about being economically attractive, but today it is driven as much by the advanced features (for example, thin provisioning and tiering) as by the economical acquisition cost. And products such as DATABeast are designed specifically via pre-installation and pre-configuration to be easy to plug in and quick to play. 
• Reliability: one way that Nexsan keeps its TCO low for users, and its own support costs down, is to employ extremely thorough (and unique) testing of every drive that it ships. This is another perfect example of a way that users get more for their money than might otherwise be expected.