
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.