Imation launches Unified Hybrid Storage Solutions with Fibre Channel

Imation has announced its next-generation, Nexsan NST™ unified hybrid storage platform and NestOS™ 3.0, a highly scalable, flexible storage operating system. The new NST6000 platform adds Fibre Channel support and delivers performance to meet demanding SAN and NAS workloads without sacrificing performance.

The NST6000 is a fully unified hybrid storage platform, providing simultaneous support of block (Fibre Channel, iSCSI) and file-level (NFS, CIFS, SMB and FTP) data traffic in a single solution without additional software overhead or licenses. The NST6000 is ideal for organizations that need highly scalable and high-performance storage that supports SAN and NAS enterprise-class workloads at the same time.

An application-friendly hybrid storage system, the NST6000 leverages solid-state technology to create the FASTier™ acceleration tier. FASTier technology increases storage I/O performance, lowers latency and extends the life of SSDs. The NST6000 and FASTier acceleration technology are ideal for organizations that are growing their virtualized environments, expanding database applications, and adding other applications that require adaptable, high-performance storage.

The first NST6000 model, the NST6530, features dedicated high performance controllers and a front-end FASTier caching engine connected to powerful and efficient Nexsan E-Series storage, to meet the most demanding random I/O performance requirements, up to 5 petabytes. Optimized for virtualized IT environments with high capacity requirements, the Nexsan NST6530 system will be demonstrated for the first time in Europe at VMworld 2013, October 14-17 in Barcelona, booth #B411. The NST6530 system simultaneously supports large-scale I/O intensive workloads generated from multiple virtual machines.

“By including Fibre Channel support in the Nexsan NST system, organizations can finally deploy a compact, efficient, fully unified hybrid storage system that lowers capital and operating expenses, and scales to meet the extreme data growth occurring in all organizations”, said Mike Stolz, Imation’s vice-president of Nexsan marketing and support. “Senior executives, storage admins and IT and data center pros view unified hybrid storage as essential to numerous strategic initiatives, including ongoing server virtualization, backup and archiving, overall data center cost optimization, and support of the increasingly complex natures of their application deployments.”

The heart of the NST6530 system is the NestOS 3.0 storage operating system, which will be available across the Nexsan NST hybrid storage solutions. “NestOS 3.0 is an exciting starting point for a new class of fully unified hybrid storage solutions,” said Ralph Akhras, vice president of product development for Imation’s Nexsan solutions. “To develop it, we brought together feedback from end users and partners along with a development team that has a broad range of storage systems design and programming expertise."

"With the NST6530, Imation has accelerated the advancement of the Nexsan product line by providing an architecture that delivers high performance unified storage for sequential and random I/O," said George Crump, president and founder, Storage Switzerland. "Hybrid storage systems that support both file and block, such as the NST6530 with FAStier caching technology will increasingly become the workhorse of the data center."

RFA Uses Nexsan NST Systems to Power Virtualized Environments
Richard Fleischman & Associates (RFA), a technology consultant and managed services provider for the financial services industry, has deployed an Nexsan NST unified hybrid storage solution both on-premise for client IT infrastructures, and in their own data center, where they deliver range of hosted infrastructure and software services. RFA and its clients needed a storage solution that could scale vertically – deploying fewer storage arrays while maintaining high performance.

“Our customers are almost 100 percent virtualized,” said Gregory Milis, CTO at RFA. “The Nexsan NST architecture handles a large amount of random I/O, and allows us to have capacity without sacrificing performance and to reduce the storage footprint in our data center. You would have to buy – and manage – twice as much storage to get the same performance and scale that we have with the NST hybrid solution.”

Milis notes that many customers will benefit from the Fibre Channel connectivity available in the new Nexsan NST6530 solution.

“Having Fibre Channel connectivity in the NST6530 solution will allow customers to take full advantage of the hybrid storage array, especially those who already have made substantial investments in Fibre Channel connectivity,” Milis said.

High availability and Disaster Recovery Solution: NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster
Imation is also announcing the NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster. The NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster is an integrated, high availability and disaster recovery solution that extends data replication and failover capability from within a data center to a site on campus, or to sites located up to 10 km away. The Nexsan NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster consists of two active/active controller nodes configured with Nexsan E-Series Fibre Channel storage arrays.