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Nexsan, a provider of disk-based storage systems, and Toshiba, a specialist in the development, design and manufacturing of storage solutions, partnered to boost the performance of network-attached storage in virtualized operating environments, with the aim of providing improved file access. The partnership blends the technology in Nexsan’s E5000 Series NAS family with solid-state drive technology from Toshiba.
Both the E5110 and E5310 are available through Nexsan’s network of authorized channel partners, with pricing that starts at $14,974.
The inability of traditional NAS solutions to accommodate demanding I/O requirements in today’s virtual infrastructure, including VMware, Citrix and Xen, requires a high-performance tier of storage to accelerate throughput, the companies said in a joint statement. FasTier is a Nexsan feature in the E5000 Series of NAS products that leverages multiple tiers of SSD technology to accelerate storage system performance with nearline-SAS, SATA or SAS drives, which the company said is ideal for virtualized operating environments and random I/O workloads. To power FasTier, Nexsan has selected Toshiba MKz001GZB Series SLC NAND/SAS SSDs for advantages in performance and reliability.
Engineered to deliver performance, endurance and reliability for business-critical applications, Toshiba MK-Series SSDs are 0.5-inch small-form-factor SSDs that utilize 32nm enterprise-grade SLC NAND flash memory and a 6G-bps SAS interface. Toshiba delivers performance with random sustained 90,000 read and 16,400 write IOPS and sequential sustained 500MB/s read and 250MB/s write throughput. Combined with a low power requirement of only 6.5 watts at operation, Toshiba also delivers a power efficiency rating of 13,800 IOPS/watt.
“Nexsan and Toshiba have come together to provide up to a 5X increase in NAS file access time as part of an easy-to-use and highly efficient NAS product line,” said Victoria Grey, senior vice president of marketing for Nexsan. “This is particularly important to midmarket IT environments with high I/O performance requirements. With solid-state technology from Toshiba, FasTier automatically optimizes files to ensure rapid and reliable access to data when needed.”
The E5000 family is the latest addition to Nexsan’s Flexible Storage Platform. It complements the E-Series Fibre Channel and iSCSI block storage systems and the CAS-based and secure Assureon archive and cloud storage systems. The E5110 provides a NAS system with 8TB to 62TB of capacity in 3U to 6U of rack space. The E5310 is a 3U high-availability NAS head that leverages Nexsan’s storage density, power efficiency and reliability of the E-Series block storage systems to provide 9TB to 720TB of storage in just 19U of rack space. Features include reservation-less snapshots, replication, quotas, AD and LDAP integration, and thin provisioning.
“Enterprises today are looking to solid-state drives and tiered storage to optimize their storage environments for increased productivity,” said Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing for the storage device division of Toshiba America Information Systems. “With the Nexsan E5000 Series NAS systems powered by Toshiba SSDs, IT professionals benefit from improved data access, outperforming traditional storage systems for those applications requiring the highest possible performance.”