Analysis

posted on 17 April 2008 14:47

Nexsan pioneered the use of SATA drives in enterprise data centres with its SATAbeast and SATAboy arrays functioning as tier 2 storage. The company added an archive product with its Assureon array, expanded the granularity of its power-saving modes with AutoMAID 2.0 and has partnerships with a variety of vendors such as Data Domain, C2C, Mimosa, Enterprise Vault and Plasmon for archiving and virtual tape libraries.

What lies ahead as other vendors offer archive-class and power-saving SATA storage arrays?

Andy Hill is Nexsan's VP for European Sales and he discussed the kind of input Nexsan is receiving from its customers.

What he is hearing is that Nexsan arrays spread rapidly inside many of the firm's customers as they find the boxes' reliability and performance make it suitable for more than the initial purchase application. The Euro Bioinformatics Institute, part of the Welcome organisation, had no Nexsan storage products in October last year. Now it has 15. The British Library, another recent cusomer, has 19 SATAbeast arrays.

Customers like these are using the Nexsan arrays for tier 2 storage and not for tier 1 applications where Symmetrix and TagmaStore arrays would be selected. But they would like still more performance, wihout compromising the product's reliabiity and power-efficiency.

Andy Hill gave no details of Nexsan's roadmap as we discussed the kinds of technologies that might be used to respond to such requests.  

One possibility was to add serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives. With SAS II having been demonstrated at 6Gbit/s, twice the bandwidth of SATA II, the logic is quite strong. It is increased still further with 2.5-inch SAS drives being a way to increase the I/Os per second (IOPS) delivrable from a rack shelf unit.

Another possibility is to use solid state drives (SSD) as a cache.

We might imagine a 'SASbeast' or 'SASboy' array with 2.5-inch drives and a cache of flash memory delivering a significant increase in performance, but not presented by Nexsan for tier 1 front line storage applications. These would provide accelerated tier 2 performance.

What other products might be possible if SAS, small form factor (SFF) disk drives, and SSD technology were added to the Nexsan mix?

Nexsan could, in theory, add some or all of SAS, SFF and SSD to its existing Assureon and SATAbeast/boy products to deliver enhanced performance product to its customers while still offering its AutoMAID power-saving technology, write once read many (WORM) disk capability, and encryption.

Nexsan partners with Data Domain to have a sub-file level, de-duping virtual tape library available for customers. The Data Domain contribution is a de-duping head with Nexsan contributing the storage behind it. If that storage used 2.5-inch SAS drives and had some SSD cache then the ingest performance and the restore performance would be seriously boosted.

Another possibility is offer a product with both SAS and SATA drives in it. Then the performance-dependent parts of a database application, for example, could run on the SAS drives with the more capacity-centric aspects hosted on the SATA drives.

Hill is aware that other vendors are beginning to offer some equivalent capabilities, such as power-saving SATA arrays. His view though, is: "Other companies have copied us - but copies are always one step behind," and Nexsan is spending on R&D to keep ahead. Watch this Nexsan space, Hill says, because: "There are exciting things coming down."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}