Nexsan gets beastly with business data

Nexsan has introduced a storage subsystem which it said could enable users to consolidate their long-term business-critical data stores into a single consolidated platform.

The device, called DATAbeast, couples a virtualising storage controller that's capable of thin provisioning, storage pooling, mirroring, snapshots and replication, with Nexsan's SATA and SAS-based AutoMAID disk arrays. Servers can connect to it via either 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel or Ethernet.

The result, claimed Nexsan's Andy Hill, is low power, high density storage, but with the sort of centralised management tools currently only found in high-end storage subsystems such as IBM's ESS (Shark), EMC's Clariion and the .

"People have now moved from consolidating everything onto one box to, well, one size doesn't fit all," he added. "DATAbeast is Tier 2 storage with Tier 1 features. It's an appliance-type solution, like a SAN in a box with all the levels of fault-tolerance you need, snapshots, virtual storage pools and so on.

"However, Nexsan's strategy is still Tier 2, sitting next to the Tier 1 players. Tier 1 is all about performance - so it's Fibre Channel drives, SRDF replication, high levels of consultancy, etc."

Hill said that as well as database or archive storage, DATAbeast could also provide the back-end storage for a de-duplication server or a virtual tape library (VTL).

He added that DATAbeast costs between $1800 and $2700 (£900 and £1350) per TB, depending on its capacity and the type of disk arrays used. The starting point is a subsystem holding 42TB, but it can be expanded to 336TB in a single 42U rack, and racks can be clustered to accommodate up to 4PB in a single virtual system.