New System Brings Big Storage to Xserve Environments

Nexsan Technologies is moving into the high-end storage market for Mac-using organizations by offering a new high-density disk storage solution that will ramp up to a whopping 42 terabytes. Its SATABeast Xi is based on the company's SATABeast, but the Xi has been modified to work with the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Xserve and integrate into Mac Pro markets.

In addition to a new user interface that's geared for customers familiar with Leopard, the SATABeast Xi has a new front cover that complements Apple's own product designs.

Beyond the easy integration and pretty cover, the heart of the SATABeast Xi is contained in only 4U of rack space, and it delivers dual-function Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity with wire-speed performance with up to 42 drives. While it's optimized for the Apple Xserve and Mac Pro environments, Nexsan says it can be used as a storage solution in mixed environments with other operating systems.

Who Needs It?

What kind of customer needs this kind of storage?

The short answer is, "anybody who's looking at 10 terabytes or more of storage for their environment," Bob Woolery, Nexsan's senior vice president of marketing , told MacNewsWorld. If a customer needs to go higher, "they can scale up to 42 terabytes without having to change the physical footprint in the rack."

Many customers with large storage needs turn to tape-based systems because they are generally the most cost-effective solutions; however, tape doesn't provide fast data access.

Woolery noted that the film, video and music industries use a lot of Mac-based applications, all of which can create vast amounts of data quickly. The SATABeast Xi is aimed primarily at organizations that want to store uncompressed, real-time HDTV, as well as multi-stream analog TV signals and do high quality video editing with no frame drops.

"A lot of that data, once you create it, you're going to keep it forever, and you're going to want to keep it online because someone may need to access it fairly quickly, and when you do, you want disk performance, not tape performance," Woolery explained. "Tape, by nature, has a very long response time.

"In addition, Apple has a big footprint in clustered servers, in higher education. Those environments are using lots of data, so we provide a very robust enterprise-class reliability product to put the data on -- and then have the performance needed to feed those clusters so they can process that data," he said.

Energy Efficiency

While tape is slow, it's also energy-efficient. The SATABeast Xi attempts to fill the gap between the energy savings a company might see with tape that is simply sitting idle versus content that is stored on primary disks that are constantly spinning and consuming energy. Nexsan's AutoMAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) lets the SATABeast Xi place its disk drives in an idle state to conserve energy -- but still lets them leap to life to provide "near-instantaneous" access to data, Nexsan says.

Room for Competition

Apple, of course, offers its own high-end storage solution, the Xserve RAID, which holds up to 14 drives and caps out at 10.5 terabytes. The SATABeast Xi, in contrast, holds up to 42 drives and 42 terabytes and offers iSCSI in addition to Fibre Channel for connectivity. Of course, high-end storage solutions can be linked together to store mind-boggling amounts of data. For example, the Apple Xserve RAID could let a customer continue to add drives for storage space limited only by budget. Still, plenty of customers fit into Nexsan's 10 to 42 terabtye sweet spot.

"Our customers produce the highest-quality rich media content, including HD television programming and feature-length movies, and have been challenging us to develop a rock-solid storage solution for Xserve and other environments," noted Chris Donoyan, president and founder of HomeRun Media, a systems integrator in the media and entertainment market located in Los Angeles. "We've never had an available solution like SATABeast Xi that delivers high density storage and energy savings all in one package for both fibre channel and iSCSI."

For the SATABeast Xi, prices start at US$1,200 per terabyte, and it will be sold through Nexsan's business partner sales channel starting in March.