Nexsan Tops Green Storage at Industry Awards - SASBoy and SATABeast

Collects two top "Storries" for its green storage products for fifth consecutive year

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., June 9, 2008 – Nexsan, a leading provider of energy efficient, long term disk storage, collected top honours in two Green Storage categories at this year's Storage Industry Awards held at the Tower Hotel, London.

Nexsan's SATABeast disk-based fixed content storage product with AutoMAID was awarded the Green Product of the Year. AutoMAID is Nexsan's own enhancement of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disk) technology that places disk drives into several levels of energy savings without compromising application performance. This powerful combination of high performance with energy saving capabilities enables users to lower the cost of owning storage.

In cooperation with Channel partner NCE Computer Group, Nexsan also picked up the Green Project of the Year award as the storage backbone of an overall 100 TB plus solution provided to the Honda F1 racing team. Honda opted to consolidate its storage with virtualisation software operating in tandem with the Nexsan SATABeast and AutoMAID. The energy savings made possible by Nexsan's SATABeast with AutoMAID was a perfect fit with Honda's "myearthdream" campaign aimed at raising awareness of environmental issues.

The "Storrie" Awards are based on votes from readers of Storage Magazine, the UK's number one IT storage magazine.

"With these two ‘Storries', Nexsan has been recognized again as a leading innovator in green storage," said Bob Woolery, Senior Vice President, Marketing at Nexsan. "With a design focused on saving energy without compromising application performance, Nexsan products have moved beyond the "on or off" MAID implementations of other storage solutions, which can take several to many minutes to wake up, to offer several levels of energy savings enabling the disk system to be "on", save energy and maintain application performance."

Nexsan's latest innovation in green storage, the SASBoy the industry's first green SAS storage solution with MAID 2.0 was announced last week.

More on Nexsan's AutoMAID technology can be found at AutoMAID Energy Saving Technology BackupWorks.com

NAS remains simple and cost-effective

One distinction between a NAS device and a traditional file server is the operating system. Traditional file servers use Novell NetWare, Linux, OS/2, Windows or Unix to offer file-based services out to the network. But file servers have other modules, code and features that do not directly relate to serving files. Because a NAS device is tuned for a specific function, it lacks other features, such as an application server or a directory server.
But even though NAS devices lack such features, NAS continues to gain in popularity because users like the concept of just plugging a device into their Ethernet network and having storage available a few minutes later. Companies such as NetApp and Snap Server by Adaptec took this one step further and created an "enterprise NAS" device, elevating NAS to a powerhouse of centralized file serving. An enterprise NAS uses external disk shelves, each containing 10 to 14 disks.
NAS systems have a credible, full-featured, performance-tuned operating environment and software stack geared toward serving up files to your networked computers. These systems also have features that allow non-Windows computers to attach to the shares like NFS and have added more and bigger networking ports, block-based storage, and 2 Gbps and 4 Gbps Fibre Channel interconnects.
Even though NAS is relatively easy to implement, storage administrator still need a healthy knowledge of the various NAS components, such as NAS interconnects, as well as NAS protocols. And with tight budgets all around, it's only prudent to make sure you get the biggest bang for your storage buck. Document what you need, plan ahead and build a solid RFP to present to the NAS vendors.