Assureon Cloud Transfer is Nexsan’s first cloud offering, but the company is pledging that it won’t be the last.
Storage vendor Nexsan has made its first move into the cloud with Assureon Cloud Transfer. This add-on capability to their Assureon archive storage system lets customers freely migrate or copy data to or from public cloud platforms and the Assureon on-premise archive. Assureon Cloud Transfer is available now.
Assureon is one of three Nexsan product lines. The next-gen one is Unity, Nexsan’s unified block and file storage solution. The foundational one is the E-Series, block storage disk arrays that remain Nexsan’s largest source of revenue. Assureon is their archive storage solution, for long term data protection, retention and compliance adherence, which has a unique file fingerprinting and asset serialization process combined with metadata authenticated by a private blockchain. It has been a fully hardware-based on-prem product – until now.
Gary Watson, Nexsan’s co-founder and CTO
“Assureon continues to be an on-prem hardware product, but the cloud aspect is new,” said Gary Watson, Nexsan’s co-founder and CTO. “This is our first cloud-related product, but it won’t be our last.”
Assureon Cloud Transfer lets customers reduce their cloud storage costs by offloading cold data securely onto the on-prem platform.
“We have 1500 Assureons in the field today, with hundreds of TB on-prem,” Watson said. “Some of these customers – but not all – also have data in the cloud. There are people who have a lot of data on-prem who want to move to the cloud and vice-versa, and there are others who just want to be able to reference it. Assureon Cloud Transfer lets you do both, as it allows cloud instances to reference that data without physically copying it. You can reference your archives from on-prem or cloud, and have all Windows instances see the same archive file.”
Assureon Cloud Transfer captures unstructured content from Windows Servers on both AWS and Azure..
“It is testified and certified on both of them, and is fully multi-cloud capable,” Watson said. “After files have become cold, we can convert them to software stubs that point to your on prem Assureon system. There is still an exfiltration fee out of the cloud for transferring out, but it is much cheaper to move unstructured content as stubs. It reduces cloud costs, reduces amount of NTS files backed up in the cloud – and it’s like a virtual airgap, so data can’t be destroyed contrary to the policy set.”
In addition, a NFS/SMB interface can be configured in the cloud as an archiving target, to both catch hot files and stub cold files.
Pricing for Assureon Cloud Transfer has not yet been announced, but Watson said that it will be very inexpensive.
“A large Assureon costs only $600 per usable TB for the end user, and the cost for this will be proportional to that,” he said.
Watson said that while this is Nexsan’s first cloud product – and that others will follow as part of their long-term strategy – no cloud veterans have come up with a solution for hybrid cloud archiving that is as good as this.
“We have been leading in archiving for a long time, but there haven’t been any great archiving solutions that have come up in the cloud,” he said. “This will help people save money, while also being both more secure and more usable.”
