Nexsan Aims SAS at Secondary Storage

MAID specialist Nexsan claims to be taking SAS to a new level with the launch of its SASBoy device, which it is touting as an energy-efficient, fast-access alternative to SATA-based secondary storage systems.

The 4.2-Tbyte device is a departure from Nexsans traditional SATA-based offerings and is the vendor’s first product to combine SAS and MAID-style technology, according to Bob Woolery, Nexsan’s senior vice president of marketing.

”It’s energy efficient,” he says, explaining that the combination of SAS and Nexsan’s AutoMAID technology offers both energy savings and fast data access. “This is for customers that really need fast access to their fixed content data.”

AutoMAID is Nexsan’s take on the MAID technology touted by the likes of Copan as a way for users to reduce the amount of energy used to power individual drives.

While Copan turns off the power to its drives, Nexsan instead keeps the drives running, but uses a number of methods to reduce drive power consumption. These include "parking" the drive head in one position and reducing the drive’s RPM.Copan offers SATA, as opposed to SAS drives, within its Revolution MAID system, although Nexsan's Woolery claims that users are now looking for the faster access speeds, even for secondary storage.

“People need a fast searching and retrieval capability in the fixed content world,” he says. “You can use this for medical images, MRIs, or for digital media where they need to get hold of the files quickly.”

Priced at $28,500, the 3U-high SASBoy is available now, although Nexsan is cagey about providing details of customer take-up.

At least one user, New York-based Lenox Hill Radiology, has apparently ordered a SASBoy. But apart from that, Nexsan was unable to tell Byte and Switch how many other early adopters are using the technology. “I won’t be able to tell you how many [users] have got it,” says Woolery, citing the "quiet period" associated with the vendor’s recent S-1 filing.

Despite the lack of customer detail, at least one analyst thinks that the vendor has taken a bold move by packaging SAS as a secondary storage option.“I am not aware of any archival platform that is not SATA - Nexsan is kind of bucking the trend,” says Taneja Group analyst Arun Taneja. “They are making the argument that although SAS is a high performance drive, there is a place for it in the world of secondary storage.”

This could even open up a "sub-tier" within secondary storage, where users identify data such as medical images that may need to be quickly plucked from their archive, according to Taneja. “Even if you’re keeping things for a long period of time, certain pieces of that could need more accessibility.”

Despite these benefits, the analyst warns that users are unlikely to switch from SATA to SAS-based secondary storage overnight. “I think it will take a while for the end users to figure out exactly under what circumstances they would want to add a SAS complement to the archive,” he explains. “The conventional wisdom has been that, for backup and archiving, SATA is all that you need.”

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