Storage System Doubles Capacity in 4U of Rack Space For Greater Power, Space and Cost Efficiency
Thousand Oaks, Calif., - Nexsan, a leading storage system provider today announced at the company’s NexStep EMEA VAR conference that it has doubled the capacity of the award-winning SATABeast™ storage system from 42TB to 84TB in only four units (4U) of rack space. Built to provide the best power efficiency and space efficiency in the industry along with meaningful cost efficiency, the SATABeast enables midsized organizations to achieve both exceptional capital and operational cost savings. The highly efficient SATABeast is the ultimate solution for data intensive storage applications that require 24x7 online data access.
The Nexsan SATABeast is an enterprise-class RAID system designed to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and simplified operation in a very dense storage footprint. With a customer reported system reliability rating of more than 99.9%, the high density SATABeast is the premier option for both primary and secondary storage applications, including content archiving, disaster recovery and disk-based backup.
The system’s chassis design reduces hard drive stress with unique anti-accumulative rotational vibration and horizontal midplane cooling technology supporting one of the lowest storage system maintenance rates in the industry. As with all of the company’s storage systems, the Nexsan SATABeast features AutoMAID™ (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology for policy-based power management that cuts energy demands up to 70% without impacting storage performance.
“Midsize organizations are challenged with continued data growth and seek solutions that not only reduce upfront costs but also lower day-to-day operating expenses. They want to use systems that provide greater power, space and cost efficiencies to drive down their total costs of ownership,” said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Nexsan’s latest generation of products, including the enhanced SATABeast, reflects the company’s steadfast commitment to deliver such improvements; with capabilities that will help their customers to save money - and their partners to compete - in today’s challenging economy and beyond.”
Key features of the enhanced SATABeast include:
• Up to 84TB of native capacity in only 4U
• Power efficient AutoMAID technology for greatly reduced power consumption
• Dual-function Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity with wire-speed performance
• Flexible, scalable and completely OS independent storage system for supporting a broad range of storage infrastructures
• Support for RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 4, 5 and 6
• Worldview™ single GUI interface for simplified management
“Customers are seeking solutions that achieve capital and operational savings and the enhanced SATABeast is specifically designed to deliver these benefits with power efficient, space efficient and cost efficient technologies,” said Bob Woolery, Senior Vice President, Marketing for Nexsan. “We invite customers to unleash the capacity and power of the SATABeast for their data intensive applications and benefit from technology that is proven in thousands of deployments worldwide.”
Pricing and Availability
The Nexsan SATABeast is available immediately through the company’s worldwide channel network. Pricing for a fully populated SATABeast with 2TB drives starts at $38,000 and scales based on configuration options.
Storage industry VARs, resellers and service providers interested in learning more about partnering with Nexsan should visit http://www.nexsan.com/reseller_signup.php .
About Nexsan Technologies
Nexsan Corporation is a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term storage systems. Nexsan delivers secure storage appliances and modular, capacity-optimized disk-storage systems for a broad range of applications including fixed content storage and archiving, email, medical imaging, compliance and litigation support, disk-based backup, digital video security, and rich media. Nexsan's solutions are the choice of small and medium-sized companies as well as large global enterprises and major governmental agencies around the world who are seeking cost-correct, high density storage solutions. Founded in 1999 and based in Thousand, Oaks, Calif., Nexsan sells its products exclusively through a select global network of VARs, OEMs and system integrators. For more information, please see the company's website at nexsan.com.
END
*A trademark or trade name of an entity other than Nexsan Technologies, Inc.
Showing posts with label RAID. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RAID. Show all posts
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Petabyte Explosion: How Caltech Manages to Manage Billions of Files
Managing billions of small files effectively requires a clear understanding of data flows and a system based on common Lego-like building blocks that provide services to application owners.
This was the message at the September 29th, 2009 Peer Incite Research Meeting, where an industry practitioner, Eugene Hacopians, Senior Systems Engineer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), addressed the Wikibon community.
Caltech is the academic home of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As such it runs the downlink for the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's orbital space telescope, as well as 13 other missions, processes the raw data into images, and supports the needs of scientists visiting from locations worldwide. The focus of this discussion was the activities of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), which has evolved to become the national archive for infrared analysis from telescopic space missions.
To be sure, Caltech's needs are on the edge. The organization is the steward for more than 2.3 petabytes of data created from its 14 currently active missions. Caltech captures data from these missions and performs intense analysis in what it calls its 'Sandbox', a server and storage infrastructure that supports scientific applications that analyze the data. Once 'crunched,' the data is moved to an archive, using homegrown data movement software.
The team at Caltech had to design a cost-effective means of providing reliable data access to all this scientific data. As well, organizationally, the projects supported by Caltech had to be completely walled from each other from an accounting standpoint. Rather than implement a shared SAN infrastructure with onerous chargeback mechanisms, Caltech decided to use a common set of technologies that would support each of the projects. The technological building blocks are:
A Sun Solaris server running the ZFS file system, A QLogic 5602 FC switch, One-to-three Nexsan SATA Beast arrays.
Caltech uses Nexsan's Automaid spindown capabilities in its archive to reduce energy costs, using Level 1 (slowing the spin speed of the disk) and Level 2 (parking the heads after sufficient inactivity). It does not put the drives into sleep mode (Level 3) and has never had reliability problems associated with spinning down devices.
Caltech uses SAIC tape for long term archiving and last resort off-site disaster recovery. However, its own tests indicate that because of the huge number of small files involved, recovery from tape would take weeks or longer.
This building block approach has allowed Caltech to use common configurations across its infrastructure. Caltech derives four main benefits from this strategy:
1.The infrastructure is architected for fast, simple, safe recovery from failure or data loss.
2.The approach scales nicely in support of Caltech's data growth, which occurs in large chunks of hundreds of TB's and billions of tiles at a time.
3.It streamlines staff training.
4.The "Lego" building-block method allows Caltech to reuse infrastructure when it comes off maintenance, providing it with large numbers of spares and saving money.
Caltech uses a cascading refresh approach when new infrastructure is purchased, placing the newer equipment in support of the most critical parts of the infrastructure and migrating older equipment to less mission-critical areas. In this case, the archive is the most critical as it houses massive numbers of files that scientists access for their research and because it is regarded as a National Archive, which should be kept indefinitely. The Sandbox infrastructure is the least critical because data is quickly migrated off it into the archive.
Click here for the entire story:
http://wikibon.org/vault/Petabyte_Explosion:_How_Caltech_Manages_to_Manage_Billions_of_Files
This was the message at the September 29th, 2009 Peer Incite Research Meeting, where an industry practitioner, Eugene Hacopians, Senior Systems Engineer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), addressed the Wikibon community.
Caltech is the academic home of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As such it runs the downlink for the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's orbital space telescope, as well as 13 other missions, processes the raw data into images, and supports the needs of scientists visiting from locations worldwide. The focus of this discussion was the activities of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), which has evolved to become the national archive for infrared analysis from telescopic space missions.
To be sure, Caltech's needs are on the edge. The organization is the steward for more than 2.3 petabytes of data created from its 14 currently active missions. Caltech captures data from these missions and performs intense analysis in what it calls its 'Sandbox', a server and storage infrastructure that supports scientific applications that analyze the data. Once 'crunched,' the data is moved to an archive, using homegrown data movement software.
The team at Caltech had to design a cost-effective means of providing reliable data access to all this scientific data. As well, organizationally, the projects supported by Caltech had to be completely walled from each other from an accounting standpoint. Rather than implement a shared SAN infrastructure with onerous chargeback mechanisms, Caltech decided to use a common set of technologies that would support each of the projects. The technological building blocks are:
A Sun Solaris server running the ZFS file system, A QLogic 5602 FC switch, One-to-three Nexsan SATA Beast arrays.
Caltech uses Nexsan's Automaid spindown capabilities in its archive to reduce energy costs, using Level 1 (slowing the spin speed of the disk) and Level 2 (parking the heads after sufficient inactivity). It does not put the drives into sleep mode (Level 3) and has never had reliability problems associated with spinning down devices.
Caltech uses SAIC tape for long term archiving and last resort off-site disaster recovery. However, its own tests indicate that because of the huge number of small files involved, recovery from tape would take weeks or longer.
This building block approach has allowed Caltech to use common configurations across its infrastructure. Caltech derives four main benefits from this strategy:
1.The infrastructure is architected for fast, simple, safe recovery from failure or data loss.
2.The approach scales nicely in support of Caltech's data growth, which occurs in large chunks of hundreds of TB's and billions of tiles at a time.
3.It streamlines staff training.
4.The "Lego" building-block method allows Caltech to reuse infrastructure when it comes off maintenance, providing it with large numbers of spares and saving money.
Caltech uses a cascading refresh approach when new infrastructure is purchased, placing the newer equipment in support of the most critical parts of the infrastructure and migrating older equipment to less mission-critical areas. In this case, the archive is the most critical as it houses massive numbers of files that scientists access for their research and because it is regarded as a National Archive, which should be kept indefinitely. The Sandbox infrastructure is the least critical because data is quickly migrated off it into the archive.
Click here for the entire story:
http://wikibon.org/vault/Petabyte_Explosion:_How_Caltech_Manages_to_Manage_Billions_of_Files
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