Taneja Group Enthusiastic About Nexsan NST5000

Nexsan Corporation announced a new solution profile by the Taneja Group titled, Blazing Performance on Unified Storage? Yes, if you’re Nexsan.

The March 2012 profile on the recent NST5000 unified storage system highlights the system’s advantages in demanding data intensive IT environments with both sequential and random I/O workloads.

"More and more mid-sized businesses are characterized by large data growth, applications with high performance storage needs, and increasingly robust data protection requirements," said Christine Taylor, Senior Analyst for the Taneja Group. "In response to these drivers, Nexsan has changed the unified storage game with extremely fast, dense and flexible unified storage. customers looking for big performance gains, flexible configuration options, truly integrated management, and real scalability will find the NST5000 to be very compelling."

Taneja Group Highlights
NST5000 Unified Storage System:

• High performance FASTier acceleration technology that advances I/O read and write performance to increase the speed of random I/O workloads common in database, email, virtual and cloud environments.
• Storage performance at impressive price/capacity points, eliminating difficult performance vs. capacity trade-offs that characterize other unified storage products.
• Independent scaling of performance and capacity while maintaining hot replacements and a common management interface. This approach enables users to tune the NST5000 system for different application needs.
• Asynchronous and synchronous replication allowing user-driven tailoring to meet data protection priorities.
• Density and energy savings with up to 15 drives per unit of rack space and AutoMAID power management.
• NST unified storage systems with FASTier optimize caching by utilizing DRAM and flash-based solid state memory, along with spinning media, to triple real-world random I/O performance. This enables server applications to become accelerated without the significant costs of pure SSD systems. The NST systems combine FASTier’s software with up to 24 Xeon CPU cores, 192GB of DRAM, 12 dedicated RAID engines, and up to1PB of storage capacity. FASTier can scale from 100GB to 2.8TB, allowing an NST system to hold entire working sets, further amplifying performance with high IOPS and reduced latency without complication, or the need to utilize a separate management paradigm.

According to the Taneja Group paper, "Nexsan has truly unified high performance block and file traffic on the NST5000. Nexsan sends both types of traffic through the NST5000 high-end solid-state based controllers. The results are high performance for sequential and random I/O, 3X speed gains for SATA and SAS, big RAID protection, fully integrated data management and protection. It all adds up to next-generation unified storage. When mid-sized business needs high performance unified storage, they should do themselves a big favor and look to the Nexsan NST5000."

The paper goes on to examine the NST5000’s acceleration technology: "FASTier uses solid-state memory, including DRAM and SSDs to drive dramatic performance gains on both SATA and SAS disk. Where capacity plus performance is the issue, Nexsan speeds up SATA I/O performance by 3 times over average SATA speeds. Since SATA goes up to 3TB per drive compared to SAS 600GB, Nexsan has solved the capacity/price/performance challenge with SATA. And when Tier 1 applications require the highest levels of performance, FASTier also speeds up SAS disk by three times over average performance rates."

NST storage systems include multiple models from 8TBs to more than one petabyte.

Key features of the Nexsan NST include:

• FASTier acceleration technology, which triples random I/O performance of the underlying SATA or SAS drives
• Sophisticated storage acceleration algorithms that operate without the need for manual intervention
• Unified storage with support for simultaneous CIFS, NFS and iSCSI
• Flexible Scalability – trumping both scale-out and scale-up storage architectures
• Up to 85% less power usage using AutoMAID energy-saving technology
• High density unified storage system available at nearly 15 drives per U of rack space
• Unified management with a web-based GUI that provides wizards and a single-pane-of-glass access for local and remote storage systems

"The Taneja Group report reflects the feedback we have received from customers with NST series storage systems deployed," said Don Chouinard, Director, Product Marketing, Nexsan. "While incredibly high performance, scalability and storage density top the list of reasons customers are choosing NST series storage systems, Nexsan’s stellar reliability, ease-of-use and efficient design have also been important factors in their selection."

To download the full Taneja Group Solution Profile (registration required)