Nexsan Jumps Into iSCSI SAN Market

Nexsan this week entered the crowded iSCSI market with the iSeries appliance, which provides iSCSI capabilities for its existing disk arrays. It offers iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and NAS capabilities for up to 1 petabyte of storage and works with the company's SASBoy, SATABoy, SASBeast, and SATABeast arrays.

The availability of SAS and SATA drives in the same enclosure lets customers scale the system for performance or capacity and provides Nexsan's channel partners with a flexible product that offers a host of features and a low price, says Bob Woolery, Nexsan's VP of marketing.

The software includes storage virtualization, snapshots, replication, real-time mirroring, and data migration. The system also features the company's AutoMAID power saving feature, which can produce energy savings ranging from 20 percent by parking the head, to 40 percent by slowing the hard drive spin rate, to 60 percent by stopping the drive from spinning. Nexsan says stopping the drive delays the first I/O response once it is powered back up by "less than 30 seconds."

Nexsan introduced two appliances. The 200i features up to four iSCSI ports and two Fibre Channel ports and can scale up to 500 terabytes. An entry level model with a SATABoy and 4 TB costs around $25,000. The 400i offers up to six iSCSI ports and up to four Fibre Channel ports and can scale up to 1 PB. A fully configured system will cost around $1,400 per TB, Woolery says.

"All the software and functionality is included in the initial price, and because of its modular nature customers can add more Beasts and Boys if they want more capacity, or they can add more appliances if they want to increase performance," he says.The market for iSCSI SANs is filled with major vendors like Dell, EMC, NetApp and others, so Nexsan is trying to compete on price while offering a competitive feature set. Other vendors like Copan Systems also are incorporating energy saving spin-down capabilities in their systems.