Nexsan recently announced the Nexsan Unity NV4000. I had the chance to speak to Vincent Phillips (CEO), Judy Kaldenberg (SVP Sales & Marketing), and Mircea Turcu (VP of Engineering) about it, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.
What Is It?
[image courtesy of Nexsan]
I’ve said it before (a little over a year ago as it happens), and I’ll say it again … in the immortal words of Silicon Valley: “It’s a box“. And a reasonably powerful one at that, coming loaded with the following specifications.
| Supported Protocols |
SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), NAS (NFS, SMB 1.0 to 3.0, FTP), Object (S3) |
| Disk Bays | Rack U |
24 | 4RU |
| Supported Expansion Systems |
N/A |
| Maximum Raw Capacity |
576 TB Raw |
| System Memory (DRAM) per controller |
up to 128GB |
| FASTier 2.5″ SSD Drives (TB) |
1.92 | 3.84 | 7.68 | 15.36 |
| SAS SSDs (TB) |
1.92 | 3.84 | 7.68 | 15.36 | 30.72 |
| SAS HDDs (TB) |
4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16| 18 | 20 | 22 | 24 |
| Host Connectivity |
16/32Gb FC | 10/25/40/100 GbE |
It’s a dual-controller platform, with dual Intel Xeon Silver 4309Y CPUs (2.8 GHz CPU, 8 cores, 16 threads) per controller, and you get access to the following features included as part of the platform license:
- Nexsan’s FASTier® Caching – Use solid-state to accelerate the performance of the underlying spinning disks
- Nexsan Unity software version 7.2, with important enhancements to power, enterprise-class security, compliance, and ransomware protection
- Enhanced Performance – Up to 1,000,000 IOPs
- Third-Party Software Support – Windows VSS, VMware, VAAI, Commvault, Veeam Ready Repository, and more
- Multi-Protocol Support – SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), NAS (NFS, CIF, SMB1 to SMB3, FTP), Object (S3), 16/32GB FC, 10/25/40/100 GbE
- High Availability – No single point-of-failure architecture with dual redundant storage controllers, redundant power supplies and RAID
Other Features (via Unity 7.2)
Along with the standard Unity features, with the release of Unity 7.2, you also get access the new Cloud Connector, offering bi-directional sync for files / directories with cloud storage solutions such as AWS S3, Azure Blob, and Unity Object store. As well as this, an SMB Access Audit capability has been introduced with the new version of Unity, given administrators the ability to view file access by user via the SMB protocol.
Use Cases
The Unity NV series of arrays is well suited to the following workloads:
- Media and entertainment;
- Hypervisor storage (primary and secondary);
- Digital video surveillance; and
- Backup and recovery storage.
Thoughts and Further Reading
I wrote about the NV6000 when it was announced in January last year. At the time I wondered, somewhat tongue in cheek, who really cared about storage array announcements in this age of hyperscaler storage solutions. But I think plenty of people should and do care that these kinds of products are out there in the market. As with the other Unity solutions, the NV4000 provides users some degree of flexibility when it comes to the protocols they want to use (SMB, NFS, iSCSI) and the transport mechanisms (FC, Ethernet). For every pundit pronouncing the death of fibre channel, there are any number of folks out in the field still running those networks from a bygone era, and quite happily to boot. The smaller footprint of the NV4000 may not be that exciting for those of us craving large scale storage capacities and high performance arrays to do the heavy lifting for our critical workloads, but these kinds of solutions are great at the edge or in places where you can’t simply roll in a full rack of storage. As well as this, in a society increasingly fascinated with surveillance, solutions like the NV4000 provide a robust solution for the storage of CCTV footage, and Nexsan also seems very focussed on solving this problem efficiently and cost-effectively.
Hybrid storage is still a real thing in the wild, because people are still looking for ways to store more and more data in a cost effective manner, and providing support for spinning disks in storage arrays, with some clever caching / storage tiering up front, is one way of doing that. Particularly when that storage needs to happen at the edge, or in places where clouds can’t be easily reached. While it seems like an odd concept for people working with data in places where big fibre runs exist to their hyperscaler of choice, there are plenty of places (like most of Australia) where moving large volumes of data between the cloud and local workloads still isn’t a terribly fast (or cheap) activity. Until that problem is somehow solved (and I know it’s being worked on by many companies) midrange, on-premises storage isn’t dead yet.
