Nexsan Announces The E5510 NAS Which Provides More Than A Petabyte Of Capacity

Nexsan has added a new member of the E5000 family of network-attached storage systems, the E5510, which now provides more than 1 petabyte of capacity. Likethe other E5000 family systems announced in August, the E5510 makes use of Nexan’s FASTier solid-state disk caching technology, which helps improve its speed by up to three times, and has support for Nexsan’s E-Centregraphical user interface for deployment and management. However, it also adds optional support for both asynchronous and synchronous data replication for the E5310, as well as for the E5510. Previously, the E5310 system had supported only asynchronous replication.

Trey Fargala, COO for Data Transfer Solutions in Orlando, Fla., said his 50-employee geographic information services technology company is currently using a Nexsan E5310 to store the terabytes of data that his company collects about pavement for its clients. Whether the company decides to move to the larger capacity of the 5510 depends on its data storage needs and how many clients it has, he says. "We just started, a few weeks ago, on statewide data collection for a Department of Transportation client," he says. "If we continue to expand, we will be in the petabyte range. It’s all driven by what our size requirements are."

The advantage of synchronous replication over asynchronous replication is that it reduces the likelihoodthat users could lose data if a disaster occurs while replication is in progress, says Don Chouinard,director of product marketing for the Thousand Oaks, Calif., company. This is not a problem for synchronous replication because none of the writes are acknowledged until they are on both systems, he says. In addition, the device now offers a new interface type, SAS, or SCSI, which offers improved performance over the existing Fibre Channel and SCSI interfaces, he says. The system also continues to support Nexsan’s Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks (AutoMAID) technology, which enables a storage administrator to configure the system to shut down drives when not in use in order to save power.

In this market, an important factor is the channel, says Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst for The Taneja Group. The stronger the channel, the better the vendor typically does, and Nexsan had already had a strong channel for its SAN products, he says. Now that Nexsan has a NAS product, it has a full product line and has been doing well with it in the past year, he says. However, he notes that major vendors such as EMC and NetApp have noticed this and are wooing the channel with factors such as aggressive pricing.

Pricing for the E5510 starts at $33,000 for 36 Tbytes and can support up to 1,080 Tbytes, or more than a petabyte, Chouinard says. While the E5310 also starts at $33,000 for 36 Tbytes, the E5510 has much greater capacity as the E5310 can support only up to 720 Tbytes, he says.

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