New Archiving System From Nexsan: Assureon 6.0

Nexsan announced Assureon 6.0, a highly scalable archiving system designed specifically for the needs of storage-as-a-service providers. Assureon 6.0 is a next-generation archiving system that addresses the demand for enhanced privacy and increased scalability while retaining the highest levels of performance and affordability.

Assureon 6.0 introduces service provider-oriented features such as extreme scalability and secure, physical separation of archives between users. Also, Assureon 6.0 features Nexsan’s AutoMAID green technology to reduce power consumption in the hosted datacenter. Assureon 6.0 is a complete system consisting of disk storage, archiving software and servers in a single rack.

"Companies of all sizes are under great pressure today to save money, save energy and operate more efficiently, and increasingly they are doing so by turning to new outsourced, subscription models for everything from their software to their storage applications," said Gregg Pugmire, executive vice president of business development, Nexsan. "With Assureon 6.0, we are providing our first storage-as-a-service system designed specifically to address customers’ needs for high-performance, extremely scalable, secure archiving. Assureon 6.0 is highly cost-effective and energy-efficient, and it is specifically targeted for the long-term management of fixed, or persistent, data."

The newest member of Nexsan’s disk-based archiving family, Assureon 6.0 features an innovative new Nexsan-designed content addressable storage (CAS) capability that enables customers to virtualize a system into an essentially unlimited number of physically secure archives. This next-generation CAS technology makes Assureon 6.0 the ideal archiving platform for a hosted storage service solution.

Assureon 6.0 provides:

• Increased privacy: ensures physical separation of individual customer files in multi-tenant environments
• Extreme scalability: virtualized CAS expands easily and cost effectively
• Accelerated performance: no more object limits, no more performance penalty
• Ultra green: energy efficiency via AutoMAID
• Cost-correct: amortizes archive costs across greater number of users, reduces capacity costs as it scales

   
Obliterating the Traditional Object Count
Marking a new generation of highly scalable, energy-efficient archiving, Assureon 6.0 obliterates the object count limitations that today plague traditional content addressable storage (CAS) archives. Previous-generation archive solutions, such as those built on multi-volume architectures, are limited by the total number of files or objects that can be stored. In many cases, customers have significant amounts of storage space available, but are restricted from using their full storage capacity as they have reached their maximum object or file count.

Rather than adding large, expensive databases, as other providers do to increase storage and object limits, Assureon 6.0 easily scales to support multiple virtual file systems. Each of these independent, private and secure CAS archives resides within one larger consolidated or federated archive. This provides the unique benefit of physical separation of individual customers’ data. This true multi-tenant approach to archiving is more economical and efficient than previous, non-virtual approaches to storage-as-a-service.

Ensures Strictest Privacy Even in Multi-Tenant Applications
For these reasons, Assureon 6.0 is ideal for managed service providers interested in storing data for up to several hundred subscription-based customers on a single remote server while ensuring the strictest privacy for that data. The product is also well-suited for large corporate environments where data segmentation between divisions or business units is essential. Thanks to Assureon 6.0’s secure multi-tenant functionality, customers can easily add additional storage capacity without compromising data integrity or performance and without facing escalating storage costs.

Jack Henry & Associates, a leading financial services IT provider, has incorporated Assureon 6.0 as the underlying archive architecture for its new Synergy Express modular software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Jack Henry is beginning to offer this service to its customers in the financial services market, as well as other industries that are attracted by the minimal capital investment required by a subscription-based service model.

According to Stacey Zengel, general manager of imaging solutions for Jack Henry & Associates, "SaaS solutions are attracting significant and growing interest from diverse businesses that want to largely operate in-house but outsource the hardware component of their systems. This hybrid operating environment enables businesses to retain complete control over their operations while reducing their information technology expenditures, compliance initiatives, and security risks. With Synergy Express, our customers remain responsible for managing their own ECM content, which is pushed to our secure storage facility and replicated to another geographic location for disaster recovery purposes. With its high reliability and performance, Nexsan’s Assureon 6.0 has proven to be an ideal image storage component for our new service."

Supports Compliance Requirements
Assureon 6.0 includes state-of-the-art digital fingerprinting technology that tracks the chain of custody for each file. Thus, corporations, hospitals, government entities and other organizations can meet compliance regulations while safely managing long-term data.

Green Archiving
Like all Nexsan products, Assureon 6.0 includes AutoMAID technology that transparently places unused data into progressively more idle states in order to save energy without compromising performance. This is a crucial benefit for long-term data storage, because it prevents the otherwise exponential rise of energy consumption as the archive grows.