StorCentric also adds support for S3 object protocol, immutable snapshots for ransomware protection, 40% improved throughput and up to 50% improved Assureon ingest rate.

Nexsan, a StorCentric Company, has announced the availability of its Nexsan Unity Software v7.0, which makes the long-time mid-market offering a full unified solution with added protocol support, particularly around object storage, as well as improved security and performance.

“This is one of the first times we are announcing Unity software without an added platform,” said Surya Varanasi, StorCentric’s CTO. “Typically, we also announce hardware at the same time.”

StorCentric is a holding company with five component companies under their umbrella. Drobo and Retrospect are SMB-focused, while both Vexata and Violin – the most recent acquisition – are targeted at the higher end of the market. Nexsan is in the middle, leaning toward the high end, with a base in the midrange, but with increasing efforts in the enterprise market. Unity has been their unified storage brand for block and file workloads, until now.

“Our Unity has just been File and Block, but now we have added Object storage, so now on Unity you can add media for Object, File and Block,” Varanasi said. “We have also added S3 Object support because we play in Veeam and Commvault environments, where we are backup targets. They use the S3 interface. So we added S3 to support object locking with them for data security.”

Another important add is Immutable Snapshots. Unity now supports immutable volume and file system snapshots for data protection, to provide secure point-in-time copies of data for business continuity. Varanasi said that Nexsan is working on improving this further going forward.

“There is room to grow there,” he said. “When you are hit by ransomware, the question is how far back you go. Just having immutable snapshots provides data protection, but also requires figuring you how far you need to go back to be safe. That’s something we are emphasizing going forward. There’s more work to be done there for us. It’s all a piece of the puzzle.”

Unity has also enhanced its compliance capabilities, with the new support for object locking. This lets bucket or object-level protection be provided for a specified retention period to create immutable copies of data, to address compliance, regulatory and other data protection requirements.

“We have also enhanced our unbreakable backup performance increase,” Varanasi said. “It’s a combination of Unity NFS and Veeam and Commvault backup and Assureon. It now goes 50% faster, but what is even more important is the way we now restore, so that the most important data is now restored first if Unity is hit.”

Total Throughput has increased up to 40% on the existing platforms, from 9GBs to 13GB/s  There has also been up to a 50% increase in the ingest rate from Unity to Nexsan’s Assureon archiving appliance.

“We have also enhanced stability with thorough testing, bug files and increased stability testing,” Varanasi said.

The Nexsan Unity software v7.0 is now generally available.