The Nexsan NST5000 is a modern hybrid storage appliance, a more efficient, agile and intelligent alternative to traditional storage arrays , filers, and all-flash arrays.
Organizations have different needs for performance, capacity and connectivity when managing and protecting the data that drives your business. The NST5000 blends solid-state technology, a highly scalable back-end storage infrastructure, multiple NAS/iSCSI front-end connections, and enterprise-class data management services in a single system. It gives you the convenience and control to meet the needs of one or more workloads in one dedicated easy-to-use appliance. For organizations struggling to meet both high performance and high capacity NAS or iSCSI application requirements, the NST5000 makes that easy with a hybrid of solid-state accelerated hard drives. For applications with the most stringent workload requirements like server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), databases and cloud computing, the NST5000 delivers unparalleled performance to ensure application demands never outpace available I/O again. Your applications will have never performed faster on a system operating at the economics of spinning disk storage.
The NST5000 is fully featured with snapshots, replication, thin provisioning, replication, compression, and much more. A revolutionary GUI and scriptable CLI streamline setup and management for the time-constrained IT administrator. As with all Imation storage, the Nexsan NST5000 with E-Series disk arrays offers industry-leading density and power management for the smallest footprint with up to 60 disks in 4U, while consuming 85% less power when idle via AutoMAID® power saving technology. A no single point-of-failure architecture ensures the ultimate in reliability. The net of all this performance and functionality is a true enterprise-class solution without the enterprise-class price.
The proprietary Nexsan FASTier acceleration technology uses multiple types of solid-state memory, including DRAM and SSD to optimize block and file operations in a fault tolerant architecture. FASTier can scale from 100GB to 4.4TB – large enough to hold entire working sets for unprecedented application acceleration. Automatic caching algorithms remove the need for manual intervention or application-specific tuning. Whereas traditional disk storage is hard pressed to meet high I/O requirements and SSD-only arrays have a very high cost with limited capacity, Imation’s NST5000 Hybrid Storage Appliance realigns the trade-off between performance, capacity and cost so IT administrators can do more than ever before.
All NST5000 storage systems utilize SSD, NL-SAS or SAS drives; two redundant, high performance, multi-core Xeon-based storage controllers; high speed I/O subsystems and a fully redundant architecture. All active components are hot-swappable, including power supplies, disks and controllers. FASTier read and write cache complements up to 96GB DRAM per controller to significantly accelerate IOPS and throughput.
The NST5000 features up to 24 Xeon CPU cores and 192GB per dual-controller, up to 14 dedicated RAID engines, up to 5PB of capacity and up to 4.4TB of SSD in FASTier cache. The NST5100 delivers up to 15 drives and FASTier SSDs in a 3U chassis, and up to 16 more drives in a 3U drive expansion chassis, for a total raw capacity of up to 124TB.
The NST5300 houses up to 16 FASTier SSDs in a 3U chassis while leveraging Nexsan E-Series™ disk arrays on the backend, which deliver up to 360 drives in just 24U, while the NST5500 delivers up to 1,260 drives in just 84U. The NST5000 provides CIFS and NFS shared folders as well as iSCSI volumes. Snapshots do not require the pre-reservation of storage capacity, and they may be scheduled and managed easily from the management GUI or initiated from Windows VSS requestors.Individual shares, LUNs, or entire storage pools may be replicated asynchronously to a second NST5000 storage system, with snapshots intact for use on the target side for backups, testing or data mining. Synchronous replication utilizes two separate E-Series storage systems connected via Fibre Channel to the NST5000 head and written to simultaneously for business continuity. Active Directory and LDAP integration make it easy to manage user identities and access rights on the NST5000 shares, while CHAP, iSNS and LUN masking protect iSCSI traffic. Quotas limit storage consumption by share, and oversubscription is permitted for thin provisioning storage, along with alarms which notify when additional storage is needed. Capacity can be expanded by adding additional storage to a running system, so future needs can be met without incurring downtime. Moreover, link aggregation combines Ethernet ports for faster throughput.
For more information on Imation’s Nexsan storage solutions, visit www.sunstarco.com or call 
800.663.5523