Nexsan Revs Up Complete SATA-Based Product Family with RAID-6 Support
Higher level fault-tolerance keeps pace with demand for very high capacity arrays
WOODLAND HILLS, Calif., February 27, 2006 – Nexsan Technologies, a leader in innovative storage solutions, today announced that its full line of Serial ATA-based storage arrays now supports RAID-6, delivering an additional layer of data protection for critical enterprise storage applications.
RAID-6 is becoming an increasingly important data reliability feature for high-capacity disk arrays in customer installations and applications with extreme data availability requirements. Nexsan’s full line of cost-correct SATA-based storage arrays -- the SATABeast™, SATABoy™ and SATABlade™ -- now comes standard with RAID-6 capability.
The addition of RAID-6 fault tolerance is the latest example of Nexsan’s tradition of providing customers with cost-correct, highly scalable and high-availability storage solutions. The combination of SATA-II performance and the enterprise-class availability enabled by RAID-6 has the potential to reshape the enterprise storage market. Customers who have been saddled with the high cost of SCSI and Fibre Channel drives can now utilize Nexsan’s SATA-based products to dramatically reduce the cost of primary storage for video streaming and other high-bandwidth applications.
“The massive capacities and application availability demands of enterprise customers are having a transitional impact on the way storage arrays are architected,” said Gary Watson, CTO of Nexsan. “The concept of RAID-6 is not new, but only recently has it become possible to eliminate the inherent performance penalty of RAID-6 technology through developments such as Nexsan’s advanced ASIC technology developed for use in its SATA RAID controllers. Applying RAID-6 to fast, high-capacity SATA disk arrays provides our customers with an optimal package of capacity, performance, data availability and affordability.”
Nexsan’s implementation of RAID-6 has been optimized for SATA disk drives, providing protection against the failure of any two drives in a RAID set. As drives grow from 500 gigabytes to one terabyte and beyond, RAID-6 also protects against the small but increasingly significant chance of encountering unrecoverable media errors during a conventional RAID-5 rebuild process. With RAID-5, such errors result in "holes" in the data, which may result in errors at the application layer. RAID-6, in contrast, provides another layer of redundancy to plug any such holes.
Nexsan offers a full line of RAID-6 enabled SATA storage solutions to service a broad range of applications, including fixed content, reference data and disk-to-disk backup and replication for business continuity and disaster recovery. Nexsan’s SATA products feature the massive scalability of the SATABeast, the ultra-performance of the SATABoy and the 1U simplicity of the SATABlade. All Nexsan RAID-6 enabled SATA storage arrays are currently available.
SATABeast's innovative combination of technologies delivers unsurpassed performance, reliability, and cost savings for primary and near-line storage, disk-to-disk backup, secondary storage and fixed content archive applications. An extreme density design -- 21 terabytes of storage capacity in just 4U of rack space -- provides a compact footprint and can scale to 210 cost-correct terabytes of capacity in a single rack. The SATABeast's unique design extends individual drive life and provides significant savings year over year, while its AutoMAID™ (Massive Array of Idle Disks) function allows SATABeast to place its disk drives into an idle state to conserve energy, yet provide near-instantaneous access to data.
SATABoy is designed to meet the challenges of the most demanding computing environments. It delivers unparalleled availability and performance in a SATA RAID device. With sustained throughput speeds of up to 370 MB/s per controller, SATABoy provides superior performance across all standard platforms and operating systems. Dual 2Gb Fibre Channel connectors on each controller enable easy and flexible implementation into a wide range of environments. SATABoy’s unique combination of high performance and enormous capacity provides exceptional value that enhances all digital information storage applications, such as live on-line data, fixed content, tiered storage, broadcast/VOD and other business-critical applications.
SATABlade is designed for businesses that require the benefits and superior performance of a scalable SATA solution in a high density, low-profile form factor. SATABlade features individual drive independence within a unique 1U physical architecture that allows easy access to eight hot-swappable SATA drives. This advanced, extreme-density design provides superior airflow for optimal thermal operation. SATABlade supports the latest 10K SATA drives to deliver stunning performance for data-intensive primary storage requirements and can be easily optimized to meet either performance or capacity requirements -- up to eight high-capacity drives in 1U.
About Nexsan Technologies
Nexsan Technologies is a leader in innovative and correct-cost storage solutions. The company creates and delivers award-winning, storage-centric hardware and application-based solutions worldwide through a diverse and established network of professionals in the storage industry. Next-generation Nexsan storage products are designed for corporate, graphics, medical imaging, animation and special effects, real time/event monitored/ online/off site storage, Internet delivered content, digital film and video, financial on-line transaction data, music and voice, video security, and document imaging. For more information, please see the company's Web site at: http://www.nexsan.com.
Nexsan, SATABeast, SATABoy, SATABlade and AutoMAID are trademarks of Nexsan Technologies. All other brand and product names are, or may be, trademarks of their respective owners.