March 3rd, 2010
I’ve said it before and, well, I’ll say it again: Nexsan is on a tear. They’ve recently announced support in their SATA/SASboy and SATA/SASbeast line of arrays for Solid-State Drives (SSD)….this comes just on the heels of support for 2TB SATA in the Beast line.
So, the Beast (4U, 42-bay) and Boy (3U, 14-bay) arrays can now support SATA, 15krpm SAS and SSD’s. Add their AutoMAID power-saving feature and you’ve got the building blocks for a very robust, dense and power-efficient tiered storage platform….which can scale out to 8PB using their DATAbeast virtualization controllers.
If you’d like more info on Nexsan, please give us a shout.
Posted in Backup, Fibre Channel, Green Storage, Large Scale Storage, SAN, iSCSI | No Comments »
December 14th, 2009
Dell-EqualLogic have announced 10Gigabit variants of their entire 6000 and 6500 Series of PeerStorage arrays. Dubbed the 6010 (16-bay) and 6510 (48-bay) they feature 2 x 10GbE ports per controller and support multipath for load balancing and failover.
This essentially removes what fibre channel vendors have been pitching forever as their trump card: bandwidth. If you’ve put up with FC’s compatibility issues, high price and learning curve simply to get more lanes of traffic, your time to switch has come.
…and because its an EqualLogic, you can rest assured these new arrays are 100% compatible with every other array they’ve ever made.
Give us a shout if you’d like any info or pricing (pricing of the 6510 won’t be available until January)
Posted in Disaster Recovery, Large Scale Storage, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
October 1st, 2009
Dell-EqualLogic have just announced a variant of their popular 6500E array: the 6500X
The 6500X is a 4U chassis with 48 x 600GB 10k rpm SAS drives giving you it total raw capacity of 28.8TB of raw performance. As always, it is 100% cross compatible w/ all other EqualLogic arrays and introduces a very dense tier for performance-intensive applications.
Contact us today for pricing or further technical info.
Our Dell-EqualLogic mini-site
Posted in Large Scale Storage, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
September 29th, 2009
Dell-EqualLogic have recently released firmware v4.2 for their PS Series of virtualized iSCSI SAN arrays. As always, it is compatible w/ every array ever made and includes some cool improvements.
The big one: support for 16-member groups. This means you can have any mix of 16 arrays in a single SAN all sharing their disks, cache, processing power and thruput. Using the big-boy PS-6500E’s, that gives you a max capacity of 768TB. Who else does this? Oh yeah, no one…
They’ve also improved upon some things like RAID reconstruction performance and Solid State Drive support as well as added SNMP v3.
If you’d like to discuss if this new rev is right for your environment or are considering EqualLogic for a current/future project, please give us a shout.
Posted in Disaster Recovery, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
September 18th, 2009
We’re just getting back from Nexsan’s NexStep Expo in Las Vegas and 2 things are clear: our wallets are a little lighter now thanks to the craps table and Nexsan is on a major roll .
Here at Scale Datacom, we see a lot of storage technology from various vendors and when the dust settles there are really only a handful of vendors that we can honestly say are innovating…an Nexsan is definitely one of them.
Nexsan has a rule of not letting too many details out of the bag w/ regards to future products, but the ones we saw were amazing..and we don;t use that word all that much.
I think I’m safe in saying you will definitely see more of what they do best: density.
With the recent qualification of 2TB SATA drives in their SATAbeast and SASbeast arrays, you can now fit an amazing 84TB in only 4U of rackspace and dole it out via iSCSI and Fibre Channel as the controllers can handle both protocols simultaneously.
There are 1 or 2 other LARGE (wink wink) announcements that will coming in the near future, but safe to say, if you are considering Nexsan or currently have it installed you are partnering with one of the industries true leaders in the SAN storage space.
Get all the details at our Nexsan Mini-Site
Posted in Backup, Fibre Channel, Green Storage, Large Scale Storage, iSCSI | No Comments »
August 12th, 2009
Now that most top-tier vendors are including support for solid-state drives (SSD), the question of whether or not to use them in projects is starting to crop up more and more. “Is it worth the money?” “How much faster will it be than what we have now?” “Will our apps make use of them?” etc…
SearchStorage has a good article on best practices for solid-state drives. If you’re thinking/planning on using SSD in your environment its probably a good idea to check it out.
Article here
Posted in Fibre Channel, iSCSI | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
Talk about good timing: Hot off the heels of EMC and NetApp’s battle-royal for Data Domain, Nexsan, in partnership with Falconstor has just announced a dedupe solution of their own: DeDupe SG (Speed and Green).
DeDupe SG takes the best of both companies and welds them into one very nice package
- Dense – Up to 52TB usable in ony 10U of rackspace
- Green – Nexsan’s AutoMAID energy-saving feature
- Fast – FalconStor’s dedupe technology with brawny hardware behind it
Add to this mix remote replication with global dedupe, NAS interface and the ability to handle multiple streams from multiple applications and it appears there is a new player that is sure to be on folks’ short list for dedupe projects.
More info here
Posted in Backup, Disaster Recovery, Green Storage, NAS | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
If you are looking for a data storage”safe deposit box” that is secure, auditable, and protected against disaster, then we’d like to introduce you to Nexsan’s Assureon secure online disk archive.
Assureon at a glance:
- Compliant-level privacy, integrity and longevity
- Self-Auditing, Self-Healing File Management
- Enterprise-Class Manageability and Scalability
- Affordable
Assureon Key Features:
- Automated Retention and Deletion
- Physical Separation of Data
- Data De-Duplication
- AES 256-Bit Encryption
- File Fingerprinting
- Remote Replication
- WORM Capability
Markets for Assureon:
- Medical Records
- Legal Documents
- Federal Government
- Sensitive Documents
- E-Mail Archiving
Contact us today for more info.
Data Sheet
Posted in Backup, Disaster Recovery, Secure Storage | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
For a while now, Nexsan has offered two 42-bay, 4U SAN arrays: the SATA-only SATAbeast and the SASbeast which allowed you to mix SATA and 15k rpm SAS drives. The SASbeast also had more powerful controllers in it. This begged the quesiton: with the prices so similar why even have the SATAbeast….well that question is being answered.
Nexsan is migrating to one platform, the SASbeast..in a nutshell
- SATAbeasts will be phased out and migrated to SASbeasts
- Allowing for SATA and SAS drive tiers in same chassis
- 2GB Cache is now standard (vs 1GB)
- Pricing has been dropped substancially
And you still get all the things that made these boxes a hit to begin with:
- 42-bay, 4U Rackmount Chassis – Ultra-Dense!
- iSCSI and Fibre Channel Connectivity in same chassis
- Active-Active Controllers
- AutoMAID Energy-Saving Feature
- 3-Year Warranty w/ 24×7 Phone Support
All of the above conspire to make the SASbeast an unbeatable value whether you’re looking for a high-performance or high-capacity solution (or both). Yes, we said unbeatable…For what you get and what you pay, the SASbeast trumps everything in its class…its not even close.
Contact Us for technical or pricing info.
Our Nexsan Mini-Site
Posted in Backup, Fibre Channel, iSCSI | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
As corporate data explodes and the virtualization wave continues to roll across the planet, protecting those environments from disaster is no longer a “nice-to-have” feature..it is a “must-have”. Traditional data backup only gets you so far and the once expensive and confusing task of remotely replication your data to another site has finally reached the masses.
And if your project hinges on the remote replication piece being bullet-proof, then the list of candidates is short and Compellent should at the top of that list.
Most midrange SAN vendors offer remote replication but their implementations vary greatly, from the simple to the “why is this so confusing?”. Compellent is the former but their simplicity masks the powerful features that lie underneath:
- Setup in 6 clicks
- Bandwidth shaping and simulation
- Realtime replication validation/testing
- Replication templates
- Synchonrous and Asynchronous options
- Thin Replication feature consumes less space and bandwidth
Add to this the rest of their award-winning feature set and you have a virtualized storage platform with performance, is simple to admin and will keep your data protected from disaster.
For more info or if you’d like to discuss how Compellent’s DR features might benefit your organization, please contact us.
Our Compellent Mini-Site
Posted in Backup, Disaster Recovery, Fibre Channel, Green Storage, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »