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NEXSAN NST4000 UNIFIED STORAGE WITH FIBRE OPTION  

If you prefer Fibre Channel to other SAN protocols, this scalable storage is built for you. The Nexsan NST4000 by Imation expands the availability of fault-tolerant FASTier™ DRAM caching and Fibre Channel SAN connectivity, and puts them in reach of mid-range businesses

Hybrid Storage  is defined as a combination of solid-state disk (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) in a single storage system.

Use SSD to increase the cache memory pool so that I/Os are accelerated before they go through the controller to the back-end disk drives. The larger the cache memory pool, the greater the likelihood of getting a cache hit without having to access the back-end disks—which results in greater application performance.

A fully unified, enterprise-class, unified hybrid storage solution that simultaneously supports block and file traffic eliminating the need for organizations to invest in separate SAN and NAS storage systems.

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The introduction of NST4000 and NestOS 3.1 brings our NST6000 fault tolerant FASTier DRAM caching and Fibre Channel SAN connectivity features to the mid-range. The addition of Fibre Channel to NST4000 expands NST’s availability for those organizations that need a mid-range storage system but prefer Fibre Channel over other SAN protocols. Fibre Channel adds to NST’s unified storage capability that already includes 10Gb and 1Gb Ethernet for NAS and iSCSI connectivity. NST’s NAS includes support for CIFS/SMB, NFS and FTP.

Scalability – NST4000 offers non-disruptive scaling options that allow you to scale up to 2.1PB in capacity and to scale performance with FASTier™ and offloaded RAID processing. This level of flexibility enables businesses to right size their initial acquisition and grow as application performance or capacity requirements change.

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• Performance Agility:
  Compared with traditional caching techniques, cost effective FASTier™ technology accelerates performance for mixed application workload environments.
• Unified Flexibility:
  Provides a mix of CIFS, NFS and FTP file sharing protocols for enterprise NAS file sharing as well as iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN block storage protocols for server volume sharing, with inline data compression that shrinks capacity requirements and improves performance.
• Hybrid Scalability:
  Scalable storage with options that let you right-size capacity up to 2.1PB and fine-tune performance with FASTier and RAID offload to meet your business’s changing needs.

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EFFICIENT:

FASTier™ – Intelligent, self-tuning hybrid caching capability that uses a scalable pool of cache memory comprised of both high speed memory and flash technologies to create a more efficient hybrid storage solution. DRAM and Flash SSD technology is used to accelerate read and write IOPS and throughput. FASTier works transparently so there is no administration burden to turbo-charge I/O performance and handle the constant growth of mixed applications in your environment. FASTier is especially useful for random I/O workloads such as databases or for VMware, Xen or Hyper-V environments.

Unified Storage with Inline Data Compression – In a single solution, NST4000 provides CIFS, NFS and FTP file sharing protocols for enterprise NAS file sharing as well as iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN block storage protocols for server volume sharing. Inline data compression reduces the amount of data written to SSD or HDD media reducing total capacity requirements and datacenter footprint and improves storage system performance. As data is written, NST compresses data, file or block, prior to it being written to the RAID volume. This reduces the amount of data written to SSD or HDD media, and in-turn shrinks the total storage capacity requirements, datacenter footprint and improves storage system performance. NST Inline Compression can be set on a per volume basis and is a transparent operation.

AutoMAID® Power Management – In NST4000, each RAID set can have its drives progressed into deeper power saving levels when they have not been accessed for a specified period of time, saving up to 85% in power in the disk array. AutoMAID Power Management is transparent to applications.

FLEXIBLE:

Three-Dimensional Scaling – NST4000 offers scales capacity and performance across three dimensions with each dimension carrying its own level of flexibility.

• Capacity is scaled by adding additional NST storage modules. NST storage modules come in different form factors to address different organizational needs. NST storage modules choices include 18, 32, 48 and 60 drive high-density storage form factors. Storage capacity can be comprised of solid state drives or hard disk drives.
• Storage Processing is scaled with each new NST storage module head. Each NST storage module head has its own RAID and I/O processing capabilities offloading this work from the NST controllers. As you add NST storage module heads, you are adding more RAID and I/O processing.
• FASTier™ – Caching is NST’s intelligent, self-tuning hybrid caching capability that uses a scalable pool of cache memory comprised of both high speed memory and flash technologies to create a more efficient hybrid storage solution. FASTier provides increased performance for mixed application workload environments over traditional caching techniques.

Unified – In a single solution, NST4000 provides CIFS, NFS and FTP file sharing protocols for enterprise NAS file sharing as well as the iSCSI SAN block storage protocol for server volume sharing.

AVAILABLE:

High Availability – NST4000 includes redundant controllers, data paths, storage module controllers and power supplies to keep your applications and users productive. User selected RAID protection levels include 10, 5 and 6. Cache protection options ensure that your data is safe even if the power goes out.

Business Continuity –

• Synchronous Replication – Want to increase your application system availability a step further? NST offers another level of data availability within the system with synchronous mirroring between RAID volumes located across storage modules. With synchronous mirroring your applications run continuously even in the event of an entire storage module or its expansion were to fail.
• Asynchronous Replication – NST4000 also provides the ability for you to replicate your most mission and business critical data to another system across an IP network that is geographically dispersed making your data available to you in the event you need to recover from a site disaster.

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  Datasheet

  Specifications

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Imation (NYSE:IMN), a global data storage and information security company, today at VMworld® 2014 introduced the NST4000 – a new ultra-efficient hybrid storage appliance purpose-built for media and entertainment and data protection workloads that will deliver Fibre Channel connectivity and new levels of capacity and performance to the mid-range enterprise. The NST4000, the latest addition to Imation’s Nexsan NST™ family of storage solutions, will be at Imation’s booth, #2505, through the end of the show and will be available for delivery in the fourth quarter.

The NST4000 delivers genuine, efficient hybrid storage with tremendous efficiency and processing power using the latest high-performance technologies as well as the flexibility to meet the needs of organizations that continue to rapidly add new applications to their environments. With an intelligent hybrid caching layer, NST4000 is especially well-suited for mid-sized data centers, mixed application workloads, data protection strategies and media and entertainment industry workflows.

Specifically, NST4000 offers significant new user benefits, including:

• Fibre Channel Support – NST4000 expands the Nexsan NST family’s unified block and file sharing capabilities by adding Fibre Channel connectivity for those mid-range enterprises that prefer it for their applications. This gives organizations the ability to take advantage of the benefits of NST’s hybrid storage using a full range of unified storage protocols, including iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, FTP and now Fibre Channel.
• Higher Capacity Scalability – A single NST4000 array can non-disruptively scale to 2.1PB. This represents 50 percent more storage capacity scale and 45 percent more FASTier™ cache scale than preceding NST arrays could offer, delivering much more flexibility to IT administrators.
• Increased Performance – The NST4000 can deliver three times as many IOPs as preceding NST storage solutions. This is accomplished by combining optimizations in NestOS 3.1 with Imation’s fault-tolerant FASTier™ DRAM caching technology, solid-state disks (SSDs) and the latest processor technology.
• Enhanced Data Reduction – The NST4000 delivers faster and smarter inline compression. Compressible data can be processed 50 percent faster, and intelligence removes the penalty of trying to act upon noncompressible data.

“It’s hard to properly allocate storage capacity to support existing needs and plan for future data growth, because new applications with varying workloads are being introduced and integrated all the time,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing and technical support for Imation’s Nexsan solutions. “It’s also hard to ensure there’s enough storage performance to support application and user demands – and even harder to build an infrastructure that delivers the right balance of capacity, performance, efficiency and ROI for the organization given all of these variables. The new NST4000 combines our experience designing the best in high-capacity, high-reliability storage with our proprietary, self-tuning hybrid cache system to create the ultimate solution for efficient mid-range storage.”

“The new NST4000 is an Imation proof point that they are executing their strategy around its Nexsan product portfolio, including bringing new storage value and productivity to the market,” said Greg Schulz, principal at StorageIO. “Their NST4000 is a hybrid mid-range storage solution including software defined storage management that provides scalability of performance and capacity, along with the reliability associated with the Imation brand. Being a hybrid also means the NST4000 has the flexibility to connect to your applications using multi-protocol block (SAN) or file (NAS) as well as support SSD caching and various types of disk drives. It’s time to ask not what you can do for your storage system, rather what can your hybrid storage system do for you and your applications.”

“We and our customers have had great success with Nexsan NST hybrid storage appliances from Imation, so we’re really looking forward to integrating the new Nexsan NST4000 into our offerings,” said Mark Tuggle of USI Corporation. “Nexsan NST solutions are fast, flexible, dense, scalable and value-packed – all at a very reasonable price point.”

Imation’s Nexsan NST™ is a set of flexible hybrid storage appliances that scale to meet mid-sized organization application and storage needs with unified NAS and SAN access capabilities in a single solution. NST combines high performance, high capacity and Imation’s innovative FASTier™ caching technology to provide scaling performance for backup, virtualized environments and mixed application workloads. FASTier is NST’s hybrid caching layer that combines intelligent algorithms with high-performance DRAM and SSD technologies to grow performance cost-effectively when it is required. NST enables businesses to right size their initial acquisition and increase performance as their applications demand it. Also, NST’s data compression capabilities reduce storage system footprint in the data center and improve write efficiencies and performance to SSDs and HDDs.

The NST family is just one part of Imation’s deep Nexsan portfolio of purpose-built storage solutions, enabling users to deploy the right storage products for the right application. The other Nexsan product lines are:

• Imation’s Nexsan E-Series™ is a family of high-density, high-performance and highly reliable storage solutions that can be directly attached or networked to workstations and servers. E-Series delivers the density and efficiency that mid-sized organizations need to scale their capacity while lowering their overall space requirements and operating costs. All E-Series systems take the extra step to reduce power and cooling requirements through their multi-level, power-reducing AutoMAID^™ capabilities. They also include an easy-to-use management interface that simplifies deployment and management for the resource-constrained IT administrator.
• Imation’s Nexsan Assureon™ is a set of secure storage solutions that reduce storage cost by offloading and deduplicating data from primary storage that is infrequently used or has aged by policy. Assureon, through policy automation, can eliminate or greatly reduce the size, cost and complexity of backups for primary and infrequently accessed data. Assureon includes multi-tenancy – with secure copy creation, data movement and long term storage – and chargeback capabilities for public and private cloud deployments. Data integrity features like file-fingerprinting and automated self-healing integrity checks ensure that your high-value data is protected. Assureon’s security features comply with corporate and governmental regulatory requirements and make it well suited for medical, financial and government organizations.

For more information on Imation’s Nexsan storage solutions, visit www.sunstarco.com or call 800.663.5523