With Macworld about to invigorate San Francisco’s venerable Moscone Center next week, it’s timely to report some news on the data storage front for Mac Xserve and Mac Pro users.
Nexsan, which describes itself as a “provider of energy-efficient, disk-based storage systems designed for the long-term storage of information,” today unveiled its new SATABeast Xi, the first high-density, energy-efficient storage hardware/software package built and optimized for the Apple Xserve and Mac Pro markets.
Journalists like The Station love the words “first,” “only” and “new,” because if those adjectives are in fact true, then there’s probably a legit news story to report. In the case of the SATABeast Xi (you’ve gotta love that product name; the focus group must have been fun), we’ve got two out of three … so there you go.
SATABeast Xi is indeed beastly–it is touted as being the highest-density storage available today, with up to 42TB of storage in only 4U of rack space. Normally, a 4U box holds about half to three-quarters of those 42TB.
SATABeast Xi also is the only (ah, there’s the third key news word) one of its kind in the Xserve market featuring AutoMAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks), which allows SATABeast Xi to place its disk drives in an idle state to conserve energy yet provide “near-instantaneous” access to data.
Finally, SATABeast Xi claims to be the only Apple storage package delivering dual-function Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity, which makes it very flexible for IT managers–who love that feature.
So there you have it. If you’re in SF next week (Jan. 15-18), stop by the Nexsan booth and check this out.