Excerpt from Nexsan Press Release
Nexsan™, a global leader in unified storage solutions, today announced that Nexsan UNITY6000 Hybrid Storage has scored an “Excellent” ranking in the recent DCIG 2016-17 Unified Utility Storage Array Buyer’s Guide. Using an eight-step process to rank its tested products, the DCIG Buyer’s Guide provides an objective, third-party evaluation of unified utility storage arrays that evaluates features from an end user’s viewpoint.
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According to the DCIG research, price points for unified utility storage arrays are making it more practical for organizations to keep more data for longer periods of time, even while lowering overall costs and management overhead. The report evaluated unified utility storage arrays from eight vendors that offer arrays for a dollar per gigabyte or less, scaled to at least 75TB of raw capacity and minimally support at least one block protocol (iSCSI and/or Fibre Channel) and one file protocol (CIFS/SMB and /or NFS).
Based on the DCIG product evaluation, Nexsan UNITY6000 offers a price per TB of $390, a max raw storage of 5,040TB and supports two block protocols and five NAS protocols. These specifications and more earned UNITY6000 an “Excellent” rating.
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UNITY delivers a full enterprise-class feature set for customers. Nexsan’s FASTier™ caching accelerates performance to meet demanding I/O requirements. This unified platform supports Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity in addition to NAS and SAN protocols. Unified HDD and SDD support can be tailored for the best, mixed application deployment environment. For organizations facing extreme data growth or needing greater application performance, the Nexsan UNITY family scales from 13TB up to 5PB. Nexsan UNITY matches flexible, performance datacenter storage with the private cloud technology behind Nexsan’s Transporter family of private cloud file sync and share appliances.
Excerpt from Nexsan Corporate Press Release
Nexsan™, a global leader in unified storage solutions, today announced the launch of the next generation E-Series P high-density storage solution. Long popular in a variety of data and capacity intensive markets, the new solution increases read performance 134% and write performance 116% over previous models. The storage system incorporates a hardware platform that is future-ready for additional field enhancements including planned on-going improvements. E-Series P enhances Nexsan’s proven 15-year history of delivering unrivaled enterprise-class features, functionality and reliability.
Nexsan Storage Plus Performance
Designed to process heavy workloads with demanding applications, the E-Series P combines a next-generation controller that delivers twice the number of host interfaces, and a controller cache memory of 72GB per system. This allows the solution to deliver higher performance and greater capacity, essential for vertical markets relying on performance based applications such as media and entertainment, surveillance, government, healthcare and financial organizations. Available in 4U/60 drive and 4U/48 drive configurations, the E-Series was architected to run in challenging environments. Its innovative designs include Anti-vibration Design™ and Cool Drive Technology™ for exceptional field reliability. E-Series P also supports Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) to meet compliance requirements and protect data at rest.
Nexsan Pricing for the new E-Series P starts around $130,000. Costs for other models vary.
UPDATE: Pure Storage lawyers requested that we remove all pricing information (publicly available with a quick search). We complied.
This post highlights the most popular Solid State Disk/Flash vendors and provides a chart to help decipher their costs. This data has been aggregated from various sources so no claims are made as to its accuracy.
In some cases the manufacturers provide a link to “Self-Service Pricing” via EchoQuote™ so you can get up to date pricing information quickly, often in minuts (last column).
Top 10 Solid State/Flash Array Vendors in Alphabetical order:
Vendor | Category | Pricing |
Astute Networks | Flash Memory Arrays | Not Available |
Fusion-io Pricing | Solid-State PCI Express Cards (Nexsan acquisition may put it on path to full appliance gear) | Not Available Range $2-$5/GB |
Nimbus Data Pricing | Flash Memory Arrays | Not Available Per 2012 article – $150K for 10TB dual configuration |
OCZ Pricing | Flash PCI Express Cards | Not Available Range $2-$5/GB |
Skyera Pricing | Flash Memory Arrays | Not Available |
Texas Memory Systems Pricing | PCI Cards Flash Memory Arrays |
Not Available |
Virident Pricing | PCI Cards Flash PCI Express Cards |
Flash Max II Starts at $6000 |
VIOLIN Systems Pricing | NVMe Flash Arrays | Velocity cards come in 1.37, 2.75, 5.5 and 11TB raw capacity versions at a list price cost of $6/GB for all of them except the entry-level 1.37TB card which lists at $3/GB.Flash Max II Get a Self-Service Quote at our Violin Systems Pricing page. |
Whiptail Pricing | PCI Cards Flash Memory Arrays |
From $50K to $250K for multi-terabyte arrays |
Original article By Karl Chen, CMO, Starboard Storage, Systems
There is no pricing information in this article.
The storage industry kicked the year off with an acquisition and while a small one it is a signal of the impact that next generation storage companies like Starboard are having on the market.
Imation announced that it is acquiring Nexsan. Nexsan has been around for a while and pulled back their IPO a few years ago. It is certainly not a very high value deal for Nexsan at 1.5x 2011 revenues. The bulk of Nexsan’s 11k installations are SATA Beast and SATA Boy disk systems and JBODs and it has been principally seen as a vendor of disk drive enclosures. Imation has been mostly an archive tape cartridge provider trying to move into storage systems with their acquisition of the ProStor RDX Intellivault product over a year ago.
In 2012 Nexsan had tried to move upmarket with the delivery of a new unified storage system incorporating solid state drives built on top of Oracle ZFS. Unlike Starboard, they did not own the core platform software and patented IP required to deliver and sustain innovative enterprise-class unified hybrid storage systems. This has clearly contributed to Nexsan seeking an exit strategy. Imagine having to be at Oracle’s mercy on storage software feature enhancements of your storage OS? That’s what ZFS-based unified storage vendors like Nexsan and Tegile are dependent on.
Imation will merge Nexsan into their securities business according to announcement articles, so it will be interesting to see how that will play out in the market.
I found this excellent Nexsan Storage Buying Guide by Drew Robb at https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/nexsan-storage-buying-guide.html
LOTS of pricing in this article 🙂
Nexsan may not be one of the giants of the storage world. But it is good at offering disk — lots of disk. It has a firm focus in the SAS and SATA disk array marketplace with an eye on the midmarket.
“Midmarket customers need storage solutions that offer enterprise features along with high density, expandability and high performance,” said Gary Watson, CTO of Nexsan.
Nexsan SATABoy
SATABoy offers a storage capacity of 28 TB via 14 x 2 TB SATA drive bays. That’s a lot of disk to pack into a 3U footprint. The company includes hot-pluggable disk expansion, single or dual controllers, multiple high availability (HA) access modes, two RAID engines per controller, full redundancy, dual Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI support, 2 GB of battery backed cache, the ability to mix and match SAS with SATA disks if desired, AutoMAID power management, and support for multiple sets and Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs). Pricing begins at $9,000.
“SATABoy is targeted at primary and secondary storage applications, as well as long-term bulk and backup applications,” said Randy Chalfant, vice president of strategy at Nexsan. “SATABoy is Nexsan’s most compact storage system, where cost-effective high capacity is paramount.”