Back on its own, following the bankruptcy of former parent company StorCentric last year, Nexsan adds a new high-end model with immutable backups and S3 object locking.
Nexsan Unity NV6000
Sunnyvale Ca-based unified storage architecture Nexsan has expanded their storage portfolio with the Unity NV6000, which is specifically addressed to address cybersecurity challenges. It also adds new capabilities like built-in immutable snapshots.
Nexsan has recently undergone a significant restructuring. In 2018, they had been acquired by StorCentric, a holding company which had just begun buying up multiple storage companies which covered the gamut between the high end of the market and the SMB, and which included Drobo, Retrospect, Violin and Vexata. It was not successful, however. StorCentric collapsed last year and file for Chapter 11, with the Nexsan assets being bought by Serene Investments.
“I didn’t think that StorCentric had been a good home for Nexsan, just like Imation earlier on had not been successful in the same type of role.” said Andy Hill, VP of Worldwide Sales at Nexsan, who has been there approximately nine years. “Serene also couldn’t identify a common threat in the StorCentric collection of assets. Now that we are owned by Serene, we are growing nicely now. The reception from our client base is happy. They are pleased to see the old Nexsan back.”
The newly-launched Unity NV6000 expands the Unity range, which competes against rivals like NetApp. It is a new offering, not a redo of something that was there before.
“The NV6000 is brand new, although we did do a soft release in Q4,” Hill indicated.
‘This is a block series backup, but we specifically designed it to address cybersecurity challenges as one part of a cybersecurity strategy,” Hill said. “There are now clients who want a specific level of security in their backups. Our Unified Storage Platform is for those clients who need more a feature-rich sense of capabilities, like replication and snapshots. It also has the advantage of being an all-inclusive licensing model. We also have clients with assets 7-9 years old because we drive reliability in the data centre space, since we are overengineered for that.”
The first line of this type of defense is immutable snapshots.
“These are pretty common now, but because we own the stack all the way to the storage, we can protect better with ours,” Hill said.
Amazon S3 object-locking support has been added to the NV6000 as well.
“These S3 Object Locking capabilities within the platform – unlike immutable snapshots – can be initiated from the backup software if it supports it, and most do,” Hill noted. “The challenge until now for object storage has been the price point. Now, however, we can bring the S3 capability at a much lower price point.”
Other enterprise features included as part of Nexsan’s all-inclusive licensing includes Nexsan’s FASTier Caching, with technology that leverages the power of solid-state to accelerate the performance of the underlying spinning disks by a factor of up to 10X. High Availability is provided by no single point-of-failure architecture with dual redundant storage controllers, redundant power supplies and RAID. The latest version of Nexsan Unity software (7.0) includes important enhancements to power, enterprise-class security, compliance, and ransomware protection. The NV 6000 also provides full multi-protocol support and extensive third-party software support, including Windows VSS, VMware, VAAI, Commvault, and Veeam Ready Repository.
The Unity NV6000 has up to 3.36 PB of raw capacity with optional expansion, and 100,000 IOPS. When utilized in conjunction with Nexsan’s Assureon active data vault, SMEs receive unbreakable backup for the ultimate in data protection.
