INDUSTRY
Nexsan Enhances Performance and Security across iSCSI
Nexsan Technologies, the leader in innovative and secure storage solutions, today announced upgrades to its SATABeast and SATABoy storage products that provide wire-speed iSCSI performance and enhanced security, flexibility and simplicity. This firmware upgrade boosts performance to 100 MB per second for Nexsan RAID storage using a single iSCSI port, and 180 megabytes per second using dual ports. Dual controller performance doubles these numbers. The upgrade will be standard for all SATABeast and SATABoy systems shipped as of today, and is available as a free firmware update for existing customers. Unique in the industry, SATABoy and SATABeast offer dual Fibre Channel as well as dual iSCSI ports on each controller. This multi-protocol approach allows the massive storage capacity of these products to be allocated to either Fibre Channel or iSCSI initiators, or operate both protocols simultaneously, as needed. Smaller environments will also enjoy the freedom to upgrade from iSCSI to Fibre Channel as and when they need the extra speed. With these enhancements, Nexsan’s SATABeast and SATABoy arrays maintain their position as the leaders in ease of use, cost efficiency, flexibility and performance. Easily integrated into existing Ethernet or Fibre Channel networking environments, the dual-use SATABeast and SATABoy are considerably less complex and less costly than assembling a comparable multi-vendor system. “These enhancements allow users the opportunity to deploy iSCSI storage in environments where performance may have been a factor previously, such as replication for business continuity and disaster recovery, or near-instantaneous online access to fixed-content data,” said Gary Watson, CTO of Nexsan. “These advanced, multi-protocol disk storage solutions come at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions yet serve the widest possible range of storage applications.” SATABeast's innovative combination of technologies delivers unsurpassed capacity, performance, reliability and cost savings for primary and near-line storage, disk-to-disk backup, secondary storage and fixed content archive applications. The SATABeast's unique 42 drive design extends individual drive life and provides significant savings year over year, SATABeast and SATABoy are the first high performance, multipurpose storage arrays to offer Nexsan’s revolutionary AutoMAID (Autonomic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology. AutoMAID allows Nexsan systems to place their disk drives into an idle state to conserve energy, yet provide near-instantaneous access to data. Nexsan's AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings enabling users to determine the right level of access speed and energy savings for their environment. Designed to meet the challenges of the most demanding computing environments, the 14 drive SATABoy delivers unparalleled availability and performance in a SATA RAID system. SATABoy's unique combination of high performance and enormous capacity provides exceptional value that enhances all digital information storage applications, such as home directories, fixed content, tiered storage, disk-to-disk backup, broadcast/VOD and other business-critical applications.