News

posted on 21 July 2008 09:51

Nexsan has introduced DATABeast, a very much bigger storage array for small and medium enterprises with 4 petabytes of scalability and snapshot, mirroring and replication software.

The company says its small and medium enterprise (SME) customers are crying out for more, and more cost-effective, storage. One in the biological IT area has installed 750TB of Nexsan storage in just six months.

What the company is saying is that it sees a space in the market for a dedicated tier 2 storage provider offering massive, protected and cost-effective capacity and answering green requirements. Nexsan believes its DATABeast represents a better product offering for such SME tier 2 requirements than those from suppliers offering both tier 1 and tier 2 storage arrays.

DATABeast builds on Nexsan's SAS and SATABoy and SATABeast products, and consolidates all tier two storage, that is, neither currently-active transactional data nor archived data, in a power-efficient array using AutoMAID progressive spin-down technology.

SAN in a box

The product offers unified network-attached storage (NAS) or iSCSI storage area network (SAN) block capabilities or Fibre Channel SAN access. It can use either SAS or SATA drives and comes as a pre-configured, plug in and run, 42U or 25U rack. The interfaces are 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel and Ethernet.

There can be 336 terabytes in a single 42U rack, with 1TB SATA drives, and twelve racks can be linked together to provide just over 4PB of capacity. Disk capacity and storage processing capacity are both scaled as the system expands. A single chassis contains CPU and memory, a switch, and hard drives. Various RAID levels are available. All the systems are designed for fault tolerance and have high-availability features.

Enterprise-class capabilities

Nexsan has added a substantial amount of storage array system software to provide virtualization, tiering, thin provisioning, snapshot, replication and mirroring capabilities. This compehensive software suite has been sourced from a third-party storage system software development company.

Deduplication and VTL capabilities are not included in DATABeast. Customers would place a dedupe or VTL 'head' in front of a DATABeast using products from, for example, Data Domain for dedupe and FalconStor for both virtual tape library and dedupe functionality.

Nexsan positions itself strictly as a tier 2 storage player and has no intention of moving into the tier 1, transactional storage data market.

The company, which has an IPO looming, says its quarterly figures in Europe are extraordinary. Every Nexsan territory, it says, is growing at a phenomenal rate.

The DATABeast all-in-one price is in the range of $1,800 - $2,700 per terabyte depending upon capacity.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}