Nexsan Launches FASTier NST Unified Storage Appliances

In August 2011, Nexsan teamed up with Toshiba to accelerate the growth of Nexsan’s FASTier technology using SSDs. Now, Nexsan has expanded SSD-based technology with a unified storage appliance, the Nexsan NST series. Storage VARs itching for the speed of SSDs without the price tag of a full-on SSD appliance should read on …

Nexsan‘s new FASTier NST unified storage appliances are promising to bring “triple real-world performance” in the most high-demand infrastructures such as — surprise! — virtualization and cloud. The NST series allows for both NAS and iSCSI modes for a range of storage options, but the real technological innovation is the combination of SSDs, SATA and SAS drives.

Those drives aren’t mutually exclusive to each other; instead, they register as one giant block of data (configurable to more than a petabyte) and the NST appliance decides when data needs to be moved from magnetic information on a spinning platter to zeros and ones on an SSD chip. Nexsan doesn’t give away its secret sauce recipe, but apparently, this combination allows for the aforementioned “triple real-world random I/O performance.” (Worth noting: We’ve seen this similar storage solution throughout the channel, including solutions from XIO and IBM.)

Nexsan predicts the performance of its NST appliance will be especially helpful for e-mail servers, large databases with frequent requests and of course, a wide variety of cloud application servers. As unified storage needs continually rise, Nexsan wants to capitalize on that demand, not just through its SSD technology, but also with ease of use. The appliance features a wizard for easy setup and configuration — which Nexsan claims takes only 15 minutes — along with a dashboard for easy maintenance. All devices feature the Nexsan AutoMAID energy-saver along with Nexsan’s Flexible Scalability architecture, which is designed to provide enhanced scaling capabilities over traditional scaling technology.

Nexsan NST storage appliances come in a variety of sizes and configurations, starting at 8TB of storage priced at $16,000. The FASTier-enabled NST storage units are available now to all authorized channel partners.