DATABeast

The latest storage array from Nexsan, the DATABeast ships in a 25 or 42U pre-assembled and preconfigured rack and provides for the small to medium sized Enterprise both block and file level (NFS/CIFS) storage over SAS or SATA drives.

The gear is self-contained, in that each rack includes all the necessary controllers, switches (both FC in 4 Gb/sec and 1 Gig IP host access is supported), management servers and disk storage; all pre-assembled, preconfigured and cabled. All main components are redundant, including dual power circuits and power supplies.

The stack is managed via the management servers, which themselves are accessed via a Windows client component (called the DATABeast Management Server Client, or MSC). The management servers provide a single control point for the management of the controllers, switches, and storage; including the provisioning of volumes and storage services. On that front, the package includes such services as thin provisioning, synchronous mirroring, asynchronous replication to a remote DATABeast, and snapshot backups (both local and remote snapshots are supported). Hardware wise both SAS and SATA drive trays are supported in the unit; the former delivered in the form of 3U 14 drive enclosures and the latter via 4U, 42 drive systems.

Fully populated, the initial rack can be loaded with up to 252 TB of raw storage, and expansion racks can be added to the pool non-disruptively to a total of 4 PB of raw storage space per system. The vendor states that both capacity and performance can be scaled independently; capacity via the addition of drive systems and performance via the addition of controllers, each for the cost of the additional components alone (no additional capacity keys or server licensing required).

A key feature of the platform is support for the vendor's AutoMAID technology, which seeks to reduce overall power consumption by placing the individual disks in an idle state when not in use. The actual depth of the AutoMAID function can be specified to the individual drive or RAID set level, and involves a power conservation/performance tradeoff according to the customer's needs. Typical configurations include the unloading of heads only during idle time (15-20% power savings and sub-second recovery times); the unloading of heads and slowing of platter rotation speeds to 4,000 RPM (35-45% power savings and 15 second recovery time); and the complete stoppage of the drive (sleep mode; 60-70% power savings but with a 30-45 second recovery time). When in full idle, sequenced spin-ups prevent large power surges when waking the drives, and the drives are automatically woken for periodic surface scans for data integrity checks.

Other features include support for volume sizes of up to 64 TB including virtual volumes that span storage enclosures; support for the integration of legacy Nexsan gear; support for non-disruptive data migration between storage pool resources; LUN masking and authentication techniques allowing for the assignment of volumes to hosts; support for VSS; and CLI-based access.

DATABeast is available now. Visit the Nexsan Technologies Web site for further information.