Friday, April 10, 2009

NavigateStorage a Premier Nexsan Partner

Nexsan, a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term disk storage, today continued to deliver enterprise functionality at value prices with the introduction of the Nexsan iSeries™, the company's first iSCSI SAN, which provides customers with more flexibility, scalability and value than any other product in its class.

To learn more and get a competitive quote contact Jim Addlesberger at 978-318-9000.


Designed and priced specifically to give small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) a new value-alternative in implementing an iSCSI SAN, the Nexsan iSeries is a complete, easy-to-implement, enterprise-class SAN that is ideal for use in standalone or fully virtualized IT environments.


The Nexsan iSeries delivers advanced storage functionality and independent scaling of performance and capacity. It offers iSCSI, Fibre Channel and NAS configurations from the same system and provides twice the capacity of similar solutions, up to 1PB of storage, at a fraction of the cost of competitive products. It also includes a complete suite of easy-to-use enterprise storage services, including virtualization, for a single up-front price to affordably accommodate a company's increasing storage needs. This holistic approach simplifies pricing, removes hidden costs and licensing fees associated with competitive products and smoothly accommodates an organization's IT requirements as they change.


The Nexsan iSeries offers customers:
*Virtualized storage for flexibility and intelligent automation of routine tasks
*High performance for running multiple demanding applications from a single high-density system
*Simultaneous use of SAS and/or SATA disk drives in the same storage chassis for application flexibility and low-cost scalability


With the iSeries, Nexsan is again delivering Tier 1 enterprise-class features and performance at Tier 2 prices with storage solutions ideal for SMBs and SMEs. The Nexsan iSeries is available in two configurations which include additional storage expansion to meet the needs of customers whose data storage requirements are steadily growing.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Storage and SDD's for max performance

It turns out Dell/EqualLogic isn’t the only vendor with an all-iSCSI SAN system that supports solid state drives (SSDs).

NavigateStorage's StoneyFly actually beat Dell to its official announcement of the PS6000 today with its rollout of the Voyager, an active-active midrange IP SAN. Voyager is available with Intel X-25E SSDs, or SAS or SATA drives. It also includes a 10-Gigabit Ethernet option – something that is apparently still on the drawing board at Dell.

It seems like just yesterday – or maybe this morning – that SSDs were considered something for super high performance tier 0 applications. Is anybody using iSCSI for that?
StoneFly product manager Jame Ervin says demand is high for SSD as well as 10-GigE.
“We have customers ready to go with SSD the minute it’s available,” she said. “They’re looking for any performance benefit they can get.”

Contact NavigateStorage for the best prices in town, or just call.

As for 10-gigE, Ervin says it has the greatest appeal among service providers. “Those type of customers seem to have the most interest so far. They seem to be ahead of the game adopting new technologies,” she said.
IDC research analyst Liz Conner doesn’t expect SSD to be a large selling point for iSCSI before 2010, but with iSCSI use growing and budgets shrinking it’s worth taking a look at now.

“I see it popping up more for Fibre Channel SANs, but it will happen with iSCSI,” Conner said. “Most people will go with Fibre Channel for high performance, but with iSCSI offering more high-end features and the way the economy is now, it’s more of an option.”
Conner says 10-gigE is inevitable for iSCSI. “They can say, ‘we’ve got it now, you won’t have to upgrade later,’” she said of StoneFly’s strategy.Trackback URL

Data Robotics introduces DroboPro, a storage array for SMBs

Data Robotics has expanded the market they cover by introducing a new storage appliance, dubbed DroboPro.


Calling on its experience from the Drobo appliance, of which it has shipped 60,000 units, DroboPro is a storage array for SMBs. DroboPro builds on a virtualized storage platform and includes protection against multiple drive failures. In addition capacity of volumes can be expanded or reduced with thin provisioning.


Like Drobo, DroboPro has a series of lights on the front panel that indicated drive failures and capacity. DroboPro connects to the network with iSCSI and supports as many as eight Serial ATA disks for expansion to 16TB. Drives of different capacities and speeds can be mixed with each other in the DroboPro.


DroboPro also has FireWire 800 connections for Macintosh connectivity and USB connectors. It is available either in a rack-mount configuration or desktop model.
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DroboPro is available starting at $1,299 MSRP, with multiple configurations to $3,999 for a 16TB rack-mountable solution. NavigateStorage