Nexsan, a leading independent provider of data storage systems, announced the publication of a new white paper presenting the benefits of Hybrid Unified Storage technology when used in today’s high-performance, virtualized environments. The document provides information to organizations in need of high performance storage with the capacity to host business critical applications without stressing IT resources and budgets. The paper complements Nexsan’s recent introduction of next generation NST5000 Hybrid Storage systems.

As the number of virtual machines increase, even the fastest traditional storage systems with the most powerful controllers are challenged with the very significant increases in I/O performance required by virtual server infrastructures. While solid-state technology can alleviate these performance issues, enterprises must deploy inordinate amounts of SSD storage to support business requirements. This can prove too expensive for many, and limit capacities for all but a handful of organizations.

FASTier acceleration technology: DRAM + Solid State + Spinning Disk = Superior Price/Performance Nexsan has addressed the SSD vs. spinning disk dilemma by combining the best of both for a high-performance, high capacity platform. The NST5000 is highly flexible and delivers block and file system interfaces in a variety of configurations for both its FASTier and backend capacities. The Hybrid Storage system offers up to 192GB of DRAM, which is expandable up to 2.8TB of 100GB or 200GB flash-based SLC SSDs, while boasting up to a petabyte of rotating disk storage. This unique configuration can accelerate overall performance of the storage system up to ten times compared to traditional spinning disk storage systems. Additional benefits include:

• Fault-tolerant architecture, enabling both reads and writes to be cached

• Elimination of the need for proprietary or unproven device drivers on application servers

• SAN-friendly cache, which provides benefits to all application servers using the storage system

• High performance NAS delivering both NFS and CIFS support

• Caching algorithms that use CPU power and DRAM in the storage system, so application servers are not bogged down

“We’ve met the performance, capacity and pricing challenge of today’s demanding IT environments by providing the speed of solid-state at the price of spinning disk. The NST5000 Hybrid Storage systems with FASTier acceleration technology leverage a modest amount of solid-state in concert with spinning disk to greatly accelerate I/O for up to 10X performance over traditional storage,” said Gary Watson, Chief Technology Officer, Nexsan. “This paper examines the inner-workings of Hybrid Storage with FASTier to explain the radical new cost-per-I/O that is changing what organizations can do in their virtual and cloud environments.”