Category Archives: Nexsan

Nexsan Announces Unity NV4000

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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.

Nexsan Announces Unity NV6000

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Nexsan recently announced the Nexsan Unity NV6000. I had the chance to speak to Andy Hill about it, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What Is It?

[image courtesy of Nexsan]

I’ve said it before, 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 60 | 4U
Maximum Drives with Expansion 180
Maximum Raw Capacity (chassis | total) 1.12 PB Raw | 3.36 PB Raw
System Memory (DRAM) per controller up to 128GB
FASTier 2.5″ SSD Drives (TB) 1.92 | 3.84 | 7.68 | 15.36
3.5” 7.2K SAS Drives (TB) 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 18 | 20
2.5″ NVME 1DWPD SSDs (TB) N/A
Host Connectivity 16/32Gb FC | 10/25/40/100 GbE
Max CIFS | NFS File Systems 512
Data Protection: Immutable Snapshots, S3 Object-Locking, and optional Unbreakable Backup.

It’s a dual-controller platform, with each controller containing 2x Intel Xeon Silver CPUs and a 12Gb/s SAS backplane. Note that 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 7.0, with important enhancements to power, enterprise-class security, compliance, and ransomware protection
  • Enhanced Performance – Up to 100,000 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

Snapshot Immutability

The snapshot immutability claim caught my eye, as immutable means a lot of things to a lot of people. Hill mentioned that the snapshot IP used on Unity was developed in-house by Nexsan and isn’t the patched together solution that some other vendors promote as an immutable solution. There are some other smarts within Unity that should give users comfort that data can’t be easily gotten at. Once you’ve set retention periods for snapshots, for example, you can’t log in to the platform and the set the date forward and have those snapshots expire. The object storage componet also supports S3 Object Lock, which is good news for punters looking to take advantage of this feature.

Unified Protocol Support

It’s in the name, and Nexsan has done a good job of incorporating a variety of storage protocols and physical access methods into the Unity platform. There’s File, Block, and Object, and support for both FC and speedy Ethernet as well. In other words, something for everyone.

Assureon Integration

One of the other features I like about the Unity is the integration with Assureon. If you’re unfamiliar with Assureon, you can check it out here. It takes storage security and compliance to another level, and is worth looking into if you have a requirement for things like regulatory compliant storage, the ability to maintain chain of custody, and fun things like that.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

Who cares about storage arrays any more? A surprising number of people, and with good reason. Some folks still need them in the data centre. And folks are also looking for storage arrays that can do more with less. I think this is where the Nexsan offering excels, with multi-protocol and multi-transport support, along with some decent security chops and an all-inclusive licensing model, it provides for cost-effective storage (thanks to a mix of spinning rust and solid-state drives) that competes well with the solutions that have traditionally dominated the midrange market. Additionally, integration with solutions like Assureon makes this a solution that’s worth a second look, particularly if you’re in the market for object storage with a lower barrier to entry (from a cost and capacity perspective) and the ability to deal with backup data in a secure fashion.

Random Short Take #74

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Welcome to Random Short Take #74. Let’s get random.

StorCentric Announces Nexsan Unity NV10000

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Nexsan (a StorCentric company) recently announced the Nexsan Unity NV10000. I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts here.

What Is It? 
In the immortal words of Silicon Valley: “It’s a box“. But the Nexsan Unity NV10000 is a box with some fairly decent specifications packed in a small form-factor, including support for various 1DWPD NVMe SSDs and the latest Intel Xeon processors.
Protocol Support
Protocol support, as would be expected with the Unity, is broad, with support for File (NFS, SMB), Block (iSCSI, FC), and Object (S3) data storage protocols within the one unified platform.
Performance Enhancements
These were hinted at with the release of Unity 7.0, but the Nexsan Unity NV10000 boosts performance by increasing bandwidths of up to 25GB/s, enabling you to scale performance up as your application needs evolve.

Other Useful Features

As you’d expect from this kind of storage array, the Nexsan Unity NV10000 also delivers features such as:

  • High availability (HA);
  • Snapshots;
  • ESXi integration;
  • In-line compression;
  • FASTier™ caching;
  • Asynchronous replication;
  • Data at rest encryption; and
  • Storage pool scrubbing to protect against bit rot, avoiding silent data corruption.

Backup Target?

Unity supports a comprehensive Host OS matrix and is certified as a Veeam Ready Repository for backups. Interestingly, the Nexsan Unity NV10000 also provides data security, regulations compliance, and ransomware recoverability. The platform also supports immutable block and file and S3 object locking, for data backup that is unchangeable and cannot be encrypted, even by internal bad actors.

Thoughts

I’m not as much of a diskslinger as I used to be, but I’m always interested to hear about what StorCentric / Nexsan has been up to with its storage array releases. It strikes me that the company does well by focussing on those features that customers are looking for (fast storage, peace of mind, multiple protocols) and also by being able to put it in a form-factor that appeals in terms of storage density. While the ecosystem around StorCentric is extensive, it makes sense for the most part, with the various components coming together well to form a decent story. I like that the company has really focussed on ensuring that Unity isn’t just a cool product name, but also a key part of the operating environment that powers the solution.

StorCentric Announces Nexsan Unity 7.0

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Nexsan (a StorCentric company) recently announced version 7.0 of its Unity software platform. I had the opportunity to speak to StorCentric CTO Surya Varanasi about the announcement and thought I’d share a few of my thoughts here.

 

What’s New?

In short, there’s a fair bit that’s gone into this release, and I’ll cover these below.

Protocol Enhancements

The Unity platform already supported FC, iSCSI, NFS, and SMB. It now supports S3 as well, making interoperability with data protection software that supports S3 as a target even simpler. It also means you can do stuff with Object Locking, and I’ll cover that below.

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[image courtesy of Nexsan]

There have also been some enhancements to the speeds supported on the Unity hardware interfaces, and FC now supports up to 32Gbps, and support for 1/10/25/40/100GbE over Ethernet.

Security, Compliance and Ransomware Protection

Unity now supports immutable volume and file system snapshots for data protection. This provides secure point-in-time copies of data for business continuity.  As I mentioned before, there’s also support for object locking, enabling bucket or object-level protection for a specified retention period to create immutable copies of data. This allows enterprises to address compliance, regulatory and other data protection requirements. Finally, there’s now support for pool-scrubbing to detect and remediate bit rot to avoid data corruption.

Performance Improvements

There have been increases in total throughput capability, with Varanasi telling me that Total Throughput has increased up to 13GB/s on existing platforms. There’s also been a significant improvement in the Unity to Assureon ingestion rate. I’ve written a little about the Unbreakable Backup solution before, and there’s a lot to like about the architecture.

[image courtesy of Nexsan]

 

Thoughts

This is the first time that Nexsan has announced enhancements to its Unity platform without incorporating some kind of hardware refresh, so the company is testing the waters in some respects. I think it’s great when storage companies are able to upgrade their existing hardware platforms with software and offering improved performance and functionality. There’s a lot to like in this release, particularly when it comes to the improved security and data integrity capabilities. Sure, not everyone wants object storage available on their midrange storage array, but it makes it a lot more accessible, particularly if you only need a few 100TB of object. The object lock capability, along with the immutable snapshotting for SMB and NFS users, really helps improve the overall integrity and resiliency of the platform as well.

StorCentric now has a pretty broad portfolio of storage and data protection products available, and you can see the integrations between the different lines are only going to increase as time goes on. The company has been positioning itself as a data-centric company for some time, and working hard to ensure that improved security is a big part of that solution. I think there’s a great story here for customers looking to leverage one vendor to deliver storage, data protection, and data security capabilities into the enterprise. The bad guys in hoodies are always looking for ways to make your day unpleasant, so when vendors are working to tighten up their integrations across a variety of products, it can only be a good thing in terms of improving the resilience and availability of your critical information assets. I’m looking forward to hearing what’s next with Nexsan and StorCentric.

Random Short Take #51

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Welcome to Random Short Take #51. A few players have worn 51 in the NBA including Lawrence Funderburke (I remember the Ohio State team wearing grey Nikes on TV and thinking that was a really cool sneaker colour – something I haven’t been able to shake over 25 years later). My pick is Boban Marjanović though. Let’s get random.

  • Folks don’t seem to spend much time making sure the fundamentals are sound, particularly when it comes to security. This article from Jess provides a handy list of things you should be thinking about, and doing, when it comes to securing your information systems. As she points out, it’s just a starting point, but I think it should be seen as a bare minimum / entry level set of requirements that you could wrap around most environments out in the wild.
  • Could there be a new version of AIX on the horizon? Do I care? Not really. But I do sometimes yearn for the “simpler” times I spent working on a myriad of proprietary open systems, particularly when it came to storage array support.
  • StorCentric recently announced Nexsan Assureon Cloud Edition. You can read the press release here.
  • Speaking of press releases, Zerto continues to grow its portfolio of cloud protection technology. You can read more on that here.
  • Spectro Cloud has been busy recently, and announced supporting for management of existing Kubernetes deployments. The news on that can be found here.
  • Are you a data hoarder? I am. This article won’t help you quit data, but it will help you understand some of the things you can do to protect your data.
  • So you’ve found yourself with a publicly facing vCenter? Check out this VMware security advisory, and get patching ASAP. vCenter is the only thing you need to be patching either, but hopefully you knew that already.
  • John Birmingham is one of my favourite writers. Not just for his novels with lots of things going bang, but also for his blog posts about food. And things of that nature.

StorCentric Announces Nexsan Unity 3300 And 7900

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StorCentric recently announced new Nexsan Unity storage arrays. I had the opportunity to speak to Surya Varanasi, CTO of StorCentric, about the announcement, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

Speeds And Feeds

[image courtesy of Nexsan]

The new Unity models announced are the 3300 and 7900. Both models use two controllers and vary in capacity between 1.6PB and 6.7PB. They both use the Intel Xeon E5 v4 Family processors, and have between 256GB and 448GB of system RAM. There are hybrid storage options available, and both systems support RAID 5, 6, and 10. You can access the spec sheet here.

 

Use Cases

Unbreakable

One of the more interesting use cases we discussed was what StorCentric refer to as “Unbreakable Backup”. The idea behind Nexsan Unbreakable Backup is that you can use your preferred data protection vendor to send backup data to a Unity array. This data can then be replicated to Nexsan’s Assureon platform. The cool thing about the Assureon is that it’s a locked down solution. So even if you’re hit with a ransomware attack, it’s going to be mighty hard for the bad guys to crack the Assureon platform as well, as StorCentric uses a Key Management System hosted inside StorCentric, and provides minimal privileges to end users.

Data Migration

There’s also a Data Mobility Suite coming at the end of Q3, including:

  • Cloud Connector, giving you the ability to replicate data from Unity to 18 Public clouds including Amazon and Google (for unstructured data, cloud-based backup); and
  • Flexible Data Migrations – streamline Unity implementations, migrate data from heterogeneous systems.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I’ve written enthusiastically about Assureon in the past, so it was nice to revisit the platform via this announcement. Ransomware is a scary prospect for many organisations, so a system that can integrate nicely to help with protecting protection data seems like a pretty good idea. Sure, having to replicate the data to a second system might seem like an unnecessary expense, but organisations should be assessing the value of that investment against the cost of having corporate data potentially irretrievably corrupted. Insurance against ransomware attacks probably seems like something that you shouldn’t need to spend money on, until you need to spend money recovering, or sending bitcoin to some clown because you need your data back. It’s not appealing by any stretch, but it’s also important to take precautions wherever possible.

Midrange storage is by no means a sexy topic to talk about. In my opinion it’s a well understood architecture that most tier 1 companies do pretty well nowadays. But that’s the beauty of the midrange system in a lot of ways – it’s a well understood architecture. So you generally know what you’re getting with hybrid (or all-flash) dual controller systems. The Unity range from Nexsan is no different, and that’s not a bad thing. There are a tonne of workloads in the enterprise today that aren’t necessarily well suited to cloud (for the moment), and just need some block or file storage and a bit of resiliency for good measure. The Unity series of arrays from Nexsan offer a bunch of useful features, including tiering and a variety of connectivity options. It strikes me that these arrays are a good fit for a whole lot of workloads that live in the data centre, from enterprise application hosting through to data protection workloads. If you’re after a reliable workhorse, it’s worth looking into the Unity range.

Random Short Take #36

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Welcome to Random Short Take #36. Not a huge amount of players have worn 36 in the NBA, but Shaq did (at the end of his career), and Marcus Smart does. This one, though, goes out to one of my favourite players from the modern era, Rasheed Wallace. It seems like Boston is the common thread here. Might have something to do with those hall of fame players wearing numbers in the low 30s. Or it might be entirely unrelated.

  • Scale Computing recently announced its all-NVMe HC3250DF as a new appliance targeting core data centre and edge computing use cases. It offers higher performance storage, networking and processing. You can read the press release here.
  • Dell EMC PowerStore has been announced. Chris Mellor covered the announcement here. I haven’t had time to dig into this yet, but I’m keen to learn more. Chris Evans also wrote about it here.
  • Rubrik Andes 5.2 was recently announced. You can read a wrap-up from Mellor here.
  • StorCentric’s Nexsan recently announced the E-Series 32F Storage Platform. You can read the press release here.
  • In what can only be considered excellent news, Preston de Guise has announced the availability of the second edition of his book, “Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability”. It will be available in a variety of formats, with the ebook format already being out. I bought the first edition a few times to give as a gift, and I’m looking forward to giving away a few copies of this one too.
  • Backblaze B2 has been huge for the company, and Backblaze B2 with S3-compatible API access is even huger. Read more about that here. Speaking of Backblaze, it just released its hard dive stats for Q1, 2020. You can read more on that here.
  • Hal recently upgraded his NUC-based home lab to vSphere 7. You can read more about the process here.
  • Jon recently posted an article on a new upgrade command available in OneFS. If you’re into Isilon, you might just be into this.

Random Short Take #31

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Welcome to Random Short Take #31. Lot of good players have worn 31 in the NBA. You’d think I’d call this the Reggie edition (and I appreciate him more after watching Winning Time), but this one belongs to Brent Barry. This may be related to some recency bias I have, based on the fact that Brent is a commentator in NBA 2K19, but I digress …

  • Late last year I wrote about Scale Computing’s big bet on a small form factor. Scale Computing recently announced that Jerry’s Foods is using the HE150 solution for in-store computing.
  • I find Plex to be a pretty rock solid application experience, and most of the problems I’ve had with it have been client-related. I recently had a problem with a server update that borked my installation though, and had to roll back. Here’s the quick and dirty way to do that on macOS.
  • Here’s are 7 contentious thoughts on data protection from Preston. I think there are some great ideas here and I recommend taking the time to read this article.
  • I recently had the chance to speak with Michael Jack from Datadobi about the company’s announcement about its new DIY Starter Pack for NAS migrations. Whilst it seems that the professional services market for NAS migrations has diminished over the last few years, there’s still plenty of data out there that needs to be moved from on box to another. Robocopy and rsync aren’t always the best option when you need to move this much data around.
  • There are a bunch of things that people need to learn to do operations well. A lot of them are learnt the hard way. This is a great list from Jan Schaumann.
  • Analyst firms are sometimes misunderstood. My friend Enrico Signoretti has been working at GigaOm for a little while now, and I really enjoyed this article on the thinking behind the GigaOm Radar.
  • Nexsan recently announced some enhancements to its “BEAST” storage platforms. You can read more on that here.
  • Alastair isn’t just a great writer and moustache aficionado, he’s also a trainer across a number of IT disciplines, including AWS. He recently posted this useful article on what AWS newcomers can expect when it comes to managing EC2 instances.

StorCentric Announces QLC E-Series 18F

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Nexsan recently announced the release of its new E-Series 18F (E18F) storage platform. I had the chance to chat with Surya Varanasi, CTO of StorCentric, about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

Less Disk, More Flash

[image courtesy of Nexsan]

The E18F is designed and optimised for quad-level cell (QLC) NAND technology. If you’re familiar with the Nexsan E-Series range, you’d be aware of the E18P that preceded this model. This is the QLC Flash version of that.

Use Cases

We spoke about a couple of use cases for the E18F. The first of these was with data lake environments. These are the sort of storage environents with 20 to 30PB installations that are subjected to random workload pressures. The idea of using QLC is to increase the performance without significantly increasing the cost. That doesn’t mean that you can do a like for like swap of HDDs for QLC Flash. Varanasi did, however, suggest that Nexsan had observed a 15x improvement over hard drive installation for around 3-4 times the cost, and he’s expecting that to go down to 2-3 times in the future. There is also the option to use just a bit of QLC Flash with a lot of HDDs to get some performance improvement.

The other use case discussed was the use of QLC in test and dev environments. Users are quite keen, obviously, on getting Flash in their environments at the price of HDDs. This isn’t yet a realistic goal, but it’s more achievable with QLC than it is with something like TLC.

 

QLC And The Future

We spoke briefly about more widespread adoption of QLC across the range of StorCentric storage products. Varanasi said the use “will eventually expand across the portfolio”, and they were looking at how it might be adopted with the larger E-Series models, as well as with the Assureon and Vexata range. They were treating Unity more cautiously, as the workloads traditionally hosted on that platform were a little more demanding.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

The kind of workloads we’re throwing at what were once viewed as “cheap and deep” platforms is slowly changing. Where once it was perhaps acceptable to wait a few days for reporting runs to finish, there’s no room for that kind of performance gap now. So it makes sense that we look to Flash as a way of increasing the performance of the tools we’re using. The problem, however, is that when you work on data sets in the petabyte range, you need a lot of capacity to accommodate that. Flash is getting cheaper, but it’s still not there when compared to traditional spinning disks. QLC is a nice compromise between performance and capacity. There’s a definite performance boost to be had, and the increase in cost isn’t eye watering. StorCentric Announces QLC E-Series 18F

I’m interested to see how this solution performs in the real world, and whether QLC has the expected durability to cope with the workloads that enterprise will throw at it. I’m also looking forward to seeing where else Nexsan decide to use QLC in its portfolio. There’s good story here in terms of density, performance, and energy consumption – one that I’m sure other vendors will also be keen to leverage. For another take on this, check out Mellor’s article here.