Nexsan Scales Up With DATABeast
The company's new DATABeast can store up to 336 Tbytes of data in a standard 42U rack, and scale to up to 5 Pbytes of data in a single system, said Bob Woolery, senior vice president of marketing for the Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based storage vendor.
The new DATABeast comes in response to requests from customers who are seeing their data expand from tens of Tbytes to hundreds of Tbytes, and who want to keep more of that data online, Woolery said. However, the typical solutions are either not priced for small and midsize enterprise, or do not offer customers a full range of storage services.
Those services include such data protection functions as thin provisioning, storage pooling, mirroring, snapshots and data replication, including mirroring over Fibre Channel asynchronous replication over IP options, Woolery said. The DATABeast's components are also fully redundant.
The DATABeast also includes a combination of SAS storage for high-performance applications, SATA storage for data that does not need to sit on the more-expensive SAS drives, and the ability to move data back and forth between the two, Woolery said. Data can be stored at the file level and the block level, he said.
Also included is Nexsan's AutoMAID (automatic massive array of idle disks) technology, which reduces energy use without compromising application performance, Woolery said. AutoMAID can be set to turn down power to or shut down hard drives that have not been accessed for a customer-specified time to reduce overall power usage.
With the DATABeast, Nexsan is essentially taking its proven storage platform and adding some of the top storage intelligence features that customers are demanding, said Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing a Chi, a Cleveland, Ohio-based storage solution provider and Nexsan partner.
The DATABeast is a new level, both in terms of capacity and pricing, for Nexsan, Knieriemen said.
At the same time, he said, it is a good product for solution providers whose customers need the advanced capabilities without paying the typical prices of competing vendors, but who still need help understanding how to use them.
For instance, Knieriemen said, customers still require a lot of education in order to understand the benefit of bringing SAS and SATA storage technologies in a single platform. "It's not a buzz word you can just throw out to customers," he said. "They need education, and they need channel partners like us who have experience in that technology."
Nexsan's AutoMAID technology has already become a good selling point, Knieriemen said. "Power efficiency is at least one of the second-level requirements for purchases today," he said. "Nobody is buying massive storage for energy savings. But when they update their storage infrastructures, they consider it. A lot of people are now measuring kilowatts per hour per square foot of data center space."