Nexsan has announced the E32F, a 32-bay storage array that fits snugly between the low-end 18-drive bay E18F all-flash array and the high-end E-Series 48P and 60P E-series arrays.
The E48P and E60P are hybrid flash and disk drive arrays in a 4U base chassis with 48 or 60 drives. The E32F has a 2U chassis – in common with the E18F – which is filled with TLC (3bits/cell) or QLC SSDs.
The E32F has a 245TB raw capacity maximum when filled with QLC drives and 491TB when filled with TLC drives – even though QLC flash SSDs use 33.3 per cent denser NAND than TLC SSDs. That’s because the maximum capacity TLC drive that Nexsan supports is 15.36TB and the highest capacity QLC drive it supports is 7.68TB.
Even so, Nexsan claims the QLC E32F is the the most compact, high density QLC SSD system on the market. It said the QLC E32F, which is priced below the TLC E32F, delivers seven times the performance of 10,000rpm HDDs, making it “an ideal replacement for HDDs in performance-sensitive workloads”.
The E32F is expandable with two additional drive enclosures up to 2PB-plus and supports 16 Gbit/s Fibre Channel and 10 Gbit/s iSCSI connectivity. The array’s software includes power management, snapshots, replication and integrations with Windows, VMware, Veeam, Commvault, Hyper-V and Xen.
Other QLC flash drive arrays include models from VAST Data and the Pure Storage FlashArray//C.