Nexsan Eyes Primary Storage For Midmarket

Part of a vanishing breed, the small storage vendor Nexsan is staking out new ground with its E-Series systems, which are targeted at a different aspect of its traditional midmarket. Primarily known as a second-tier backup storage vendor that delivers rock-solid reliability, the company is now going after the primary storage market by adding impressive performance capabilities.

Nexsan says that the E-Series is a "significant evolutionary step" that delivers optimal ease, efficiency and enterprise-class features in an integrated and affordably priced package. With 27,000 units sold to 10,000 customers globally, the company's latest products--E18, E60 and E60X--offer two to three times the performance of previous systems, with the ability to mix drive types and up to three times the drive density of competing systems.

They also feature an enhanced AutoMAID "speed with green" technology, for up to 87 percent reduction in power consumption, and the new Active Drawer Technology, which simplifies the maintenance of a high-density system. Supporting mixed SAS/SSD drive types, the E18 offers 18 SAS drives in a 2U form factor, for up to 10.8TBytes of capacity per chassis. It also includes up to two of Nexsan's next-generation controllers per E18, with two 8Gbps Fibre Channel and two 1Gbps iSCSI per controller.

The E60 features 60 SATA/SAS drives in a 4U form factor for up to 120TBytes of capacity per chassis, while the E60X offers two 4x SAS connectors and a dedicated Ethernet port for management. The E-Series includes centralized storage management software for simplified deployment, management and support, and offers a complete range of enterprise-class features, including high density, high reliability, low power operation and small space consumption.

The E-Series is a significant step for Nexsan, says George Crump, lead analyst, Storage Switzerland LLC. He says that the company is known for disk backup and is trying to move into primary storage."Nexsan for a long time has been thought of as second-tier storage, backup, not for mission-critical data. Now they're getting into really good performance numbers. They've always had real good reliability, but I think they've continued to improve the reliability of the product and at the same time are addressing speed, especially the E18."

The second thing that really jumped out to Crump is the innovative way that Nexsan is taking advantage of the hardware. "A lot of hardware companies proudly bill themselves as software companies. When you look at what Nexsan is doing, things nobody else is doing in hardware, they're making hardware matter rather than use off-the-shelf hardware from other OEMs."

All three members of the E-Series family are currently shipping, with volume shipments scheduled to begin in April. Prices start at under $45,000 for the E18 with nine drives and 450Gbit SAS and up to $140,000 for the E60 with 60 drives and 600Gbit SAS.

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