Imation, which has branched out far beyond its tape storage beginnings, on Aug. 19 unveiled a new Nexsan NST unified hybrid storage platform to go with NestOS 3.0, a highly scalable, flexible storage operating system.
The new NST6000 platform adds Fibre Channel support and can handle big data SAN and NAS workloads with improved performance, the company said.
Some background: Minnesota-based Imation acquired California-based Nexsan last January for about $120 million.
The NST6000 is a fully unified hybrid storage platform, providing simultaneous support of block (Fibre Channel, iSCSI) and file-level (NFS, CIFS, SMB and FTP) data traffic in a single system without additional software overhead or licenses.
The NST6000 is designed for enterprises that need highly scalable and high-performance storage that supports SAN and NAS enterprise-class workloads at the same time, Imation said.
The NST6000 uses solid-state disks for its FASTier acceleration tier to go with hard disk storage. The NST6000 and FASTier acceleration technology are aimed at enterprises that are growing their virtualized environments, expanding database applications and adding other applications that require adaptable, high-performance storage, the company said.
The first NST6000 model, the NST6530, features dedicated high performance controllers and a front-end FASTier caching engine connected to Nexsan E-Series storage for up to 5PB of capacity.
Nexsan NST6530, optimized for virtualized environments with high-capacity requirements, will be demonstrated for the first time at VMworld 2013, to be held Aug. 25-29 in San Francisco. The NST6530 system simultaneously supports large-scale I/O intensive workloads generated from multiple virtual machines, Imation said.
The Nexsan NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster solution is available immediately through Nexsan channel partners. The NST6530 and NestOS 3.0 will be available this fall, Imation said. Fibre Channel connectivity will only be available on NST6000 series systems.
For full specifications on the new Nexsan NST6000 series systems, download the data sheets (PDFs): Nexsan NST6000 system; Nexsan NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster.