ACADEMIA

Nexsan announced that the Nexsan NST5000 unified storage system has been selected by Datapipe, a leading provider of mission-critical IT services, for use in its cloud-based storage initiative. Part of the Nexsan Flexible Storage Platform of products, the NST5000 is ideally suited for cloud-based environments that require enterprise-class features and the high performance delivered by Nexsan FASTier acceleration technology.

As a trusted global IT services provider for customers in a broad range of vertical industries, including pharmaceutical, financial services, healthcare and retails, Datapipe has an active initiative for managed storage in the cloud. Designed to safeguard mission critical data against hardware failure and human error, the cloud-based managed storage solution from Datapipe is a critical data protection backbone for a large range of mid-sized enterprises. When it came to selecting a storage solution for its cloud initiative, Datapipe could not compromise. The company required high performance, superior reliability and the flexibility to support random I/O workloads.

To help in its selection, Datapipe turned to its trusted value added reseller RADirect ( www.rad-direct.com ). "Datapipe is a solution provider that prides itself on selecting quality solutions to support the needs of its customers," said Stephanie VanDerHeide, Senior Account Manager for RADirect. "They put every solution through a rigorous proof-of-concept evaluation before making a selection to ensure that it met their requirements for performance, functionality and capacity. Datapipe selected the Nexsan NST5000, which exceeded expectations and has proven to be the ideal choice for their cloud infrastructure."

NST unified storage systems feature FASTier acceleration technology to intelligently optimize caching and tiering by utilizing DRAM and flash-based solid state memory. Along with spinning media, FASTier triples real-world random I/O performance to enable higher performing IT environments. The new NST systems combine FASTier's sophisticated 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. With NST storage systems, SATA drives can be used to deliver performance which was only attainable with 15K SAS drives previously, and 15K SAS drives can be used to deliver unprecedented new levels of performance in virtualized infrastructures, databases, email servers, or in cloud deployments.

In practice, Datapipe has found the NST5000 to be ideally suited for its cloud storage environment. Especially attractive is the ability to use high capacity 3TB SATA drives in the solution to get a combination of ultra high capacity with three times the performance. Also a significant factor supporting Datapipe's selection was Nexsan's FASTier acceleration technology. FASTier works transparently to boost performance for random I/O workload demands.

"FASTier is the 'secret sauce' that sets the NST5000 apart from other storage solutions we tested," said Sanford "Sam" Coker, Director of Storage Administration, Datapipe Managed IT Services. "The technology changes the game for Nexsan and provides benefits that are of significant value to us and our customers."