Imation Nexsan NST4000 HDD/SSD Storage System

Imation Corp. announced at VMworld Europe 2014 that its Nexsan NST4000 – an efficient hybrid storage appliance purpose-built for media and entertainment and data protection workloads – is available for sale.

Imation sales representatives will start taking orders later this month, and NST4000 appliances will start shipping in November.

The NST4000, the latest addition to NST family of storage solutions, was available for demonstrations at Imation’s VMworld Europe 2014 booth, through the end of the show. Meanwhile, end users and resellers working in mid-sized data centers, the media and entertainment industry and beyond are already benefitting from the NST4000’s efficiency, capacity and performance through an Imation beta program.

“As a business operating in media and entertainment, performance is huge for us – and the NST4000 has been outstanding in our environment,” said Jon Mauldin, VP of technology, Fotokem Non-Linear. “The NST4000 delivers efficient hybrid storage with tremendous processing power and remarkable flexibility, which is important given the Mac and other clients we have within our infrastructure.”

“Imation’s Nexsan NST4000 adds a significant capability for mid-market storage,” said Jim Bagley, senior analyst, SSG-Now. “Its well-developed hybrid algorithms, in-line compression and underlying object storage capabilities create an efficient storage system that can scale easily.”

The NST4000 delivers hybrid storage with efficiency and processing power using the latest high-performance technologies as well as the flexibility to meet the needs of organizations that continue to rapidly add new applications to their environments. With an intelligent hybrid caching layer, the choice of FC or iSCSI connectivity and new levels of capacity and performance, NST4000 is suited for mid-sized data centers, mixed application workloads, data protection strategies and media and entertainment industry workflows.

Specifically, NST4000 offer benefits, including:

• FC Support – NST4000 expands the Nexsan NST family’s unified block and file sharing capabilities by adding FC connectivity for those mid-range enterprises that prefer it for their applications. This gives organizations the ability to take advantage of the benefits of NST’s hybrid storage using a full range of unified storage protocols, including iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, FTP and now FC.
• Higher Capacity Scalability – A single NST4000 array can non-disruptively scale to 2.1PB. This represents 50% more storage capacity scale and 45% more FASTier cache scale than preceding NST arrays could offer, delivering much more flexibility to IT administrators.
• Increased Performance – The NST4000 can deliver three times as many IO/s as preceding NST storage solutions. This is accomplished by combining optimizations in NestOS 3.1 with Imation’s fault-tolerant FASTier DRAM caching technology, SSDs and the latest processor technology.
• Enhanced Data Reduction – The NST4000 delivers faster and smarter inline compression. Compressible data can be processed 50% faster than with preceding NST arrays, and intelligence removes the penalty of trying to act upon noncompressible data.

NST is a set of flexible hybrid storage appliances that scale to meet mid-sized organization application and storage needs with unified NAS and SAN access capabilities in a single solution. It combines performance, capacity and Imation’s FASTier caching technology to provide scaling performance for backup, virtualized environments and mixed application workloads.

FASTier is NST’s hybrid caching layer that combines intelligent algorithms with DRAM and SSD technologies to grow performance cost-effectively when it is required.

NST enables businesses to right size their initial acquisition and increase performance as their applications demand it. Also, NST’s data compression capabilities reduce storage system footprint in the data center and improve write efficiencies and performance to SSDs and HDDs.

The NST family is one part of Imation’s Nexsan portfolio of purpose-built storage solutions.

The other Nexsan product lines are:

• E-Series is a family of density, performance and reliable storage solutions that can be directly attached or networked to workstations and servers.
• Assureon is a set of secure storage solutions that reduce storage cost by offloading and deduplicating data from primary storage that is infrequently used or has aged by policy.