Nexan has announced that it will feature a live product demonstration of the E48, the newest member of the E-Series line of SAN storage systems, at the 2012 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, April 14-19. The E48 delivers up to 144TB of storage in 4U and can be expanded to into additional bays with the E60X expansion unit (60 disks in 4U) or the E18X expansion unit (18 drives in 2U).
Nexan has announced that it will feature a live product demonstration of the E48, the newest member of the E-Series line of SAN storage systems, at the 2012 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, April 14-19. The E48 delivers up to 144TB of storage in 4U and can be expanded to into additional bays with the E60X expansion unit (60 disks in 4U) or the E18X expansion unit (18 drives in 2U).
Performance in Media Environments
It’s no coincidence that Nexan will be showcasing the new E48 at the NAB trade show. The E48’s sister platform, the E18, demonstrated a 2,164 MB/second sequential I/O read performance and 1,004 MB/second write performance in recent benchmarking by openBench Labs. If the E48 can match that performance, it will have wide appeal in one of Nexan’s key markets: digital media production.
Performance and capacity are key requirements for the digital media sector, where IT departments need to retain all data from original files through revisions generated during post-production. Nexan has also designed E48 to handle demanding media projects from multiple editors working on the same or different activities without storage limitations.
E-Series systems can be deployed for primary storage, secondary storage and backup-to-disk storage for physical servers or virtual servers running on VMware, Hyper-V or Xen virtualization software. The E-Series storage systems are certified “VMware Ready” by VMware for Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage and are certified for use with Windows Server 2003/2008.
Flexibility and Accessibility
Nexan intends the E48 to be within reach of small and resource-constrained IT departments. The E-Series supports SATA/SAS/SSD drives in the same chassis along with a choice of I/O ports including dual port 8Gb FC, or dual port 10Gb iSCSI, or dual port 24Gb SASX4; as well as two 1Gb iSCSI ports. This level of flexibility and control is designed for organizations that need a single solution to handle the requirements of all their applications.
The Nexsan Storage Manager is a storage management software that resides on the E48 system and is accessed via web browser. Storage Manager manages and monitors all local and remote Nexsan storage systems including disk provisioning, RAID hardware management, LUN masking and binding, host data path services, failover/failback, data migration, RAID set builds and power management. The E-Series is VDS-compliant, allowing administrators to use the storage management tools that are built into Windows Server to perform common administrative tasks.
AutoMAID Energy Efficiency Technology
When a disk group has not been accessed for a specified time period, Nexan’s AutoMAID technology can place the group into progressively lower states of power consumption. Once the first I/O request has been served, the spindles continue at full speed until enough time has lapsed to progress back into sleep mode, based on the policies established. This is beneficial in long-term bulk storage, archive and backup-to-disk applications that don’t need to spin at full speed between backup operations.
Nexan’s High-Availability Architecture
The Nexsan E-Series architecture ensures no single point-of-failure, with multipathing support and dual redundant, hot-swappable active components. SNMP alerts or email notifications are sent to the administrator in the event of a component or drive failure and a spare drive is automatically rebuilt into the RAID set. The E-Series uses 4GB of battery-backed and flash-protected cache per controller and mirrors cache between controllers. Nexsan’s Active Drawer TechnologyTM allows a drawer of drives to be pulled and serviced by one person while the system remains online.
