Imation Nexsan NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster Reporting Interest

Imation is reporting strong interest in its Nexsan NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster system among customers worldwide, driven by imperatives to maintain continuous availability for mission-critical applications, create agile IT infrastructures and reduce overall costs.

Part of NST6000 Unified Hybrid Storage portfolio, the NST6000MC is for IT staff seeking to reduce system complexity, simplify management and earn ROI by improving mission-critical application availability while scaling performance and storage capacity.

Since we launched our stretched cluster solution in August, we've seen increasing demand from customers who place a premium on avoiding downtime and having synchronous mirrored storage at two sites. Our customers are focused on BC solutions that are easy to manage, maintain, install and scale.

For example, a security manufacturer is deploying multiple NST6000MC to support security operations at several airports, an application that requires high storage scalability and 24/7 up time. In addition, customers in industries like finance, healthcare, utilities and manufacturing are showing interest in the NST6000MC to ensure up time for databases, virtualized servers and business applications.

It is a compact, scalable, integrated solution for HA and DR that extends data replication and failover capability from within a data center to a campus site or to a metro site located up to 10km away. As part of the NST6000 Unified Hybrid Storage platform, the NST60000MC supports SAN and NAS protocols, while leveraging solid-state storage to accelerate read performance of the underlying spinning disk drives housed in efficient FC-connected Nexsan E-Series storage arrays. The result is a lower cost-per-I/O and lower TCO.

Additional features include:

• HA Failover: Active/Active controllers provide HA failover from one NST6000MC node to another.
• Synchronous Mirroring: Delivers continuous, up-to-date copies of data to different sites.
• Client Support: Supports Linux, OS X, Unix, Windows, vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer clients.
• Storage Services: Supports CIFS, SMBv1, NFSv3, NFSv4, iSCSI target and FTP protocols.
• Nexsan FASTier Caching: Uses flexible, scalable FASTier read caching to accelerate read operations.
• Scalable: Up to 5PB of E-Series reliable, energy-efficient, high performance, FC RAID storage expansion.

Next Generation Unified Hybrid Storage

NST6000 Unified Hybrid Storage platform was demonstrated at VMworld Barcelona. The platform is designed to meet a range of I/O requirements in a single system, providing support for block (FC or iSCSI) or file-based (NFS, CIFS, SMB and FTP) traffic without sacrificing performance or requiring additional software or licenses. As a result, the NST6000 system efficiently supports high capacity I/O intensive workloads generated in virtualized environments.

FASTier caching built into the NST6000 controller uses a combination of DRAM and flash-based SSD storage to deliver lower latency, accelerate performance of the underlying spinning disks and reduce the wear issues of flash.

In addition, the NST6000 enables users to scale up write and read cache capacities by expanding both internal DRAM and SSD capacity. Storage managers can dictate how solid-state memory is used across applications by customizing FASTier read caches for specific volumes in the underlying spinning disk storage.

IT managers can take advantage of a range of back-end storage options to scale the NST6000 storage system for capacity and performance. The system connects with Nexsan E-Series arrays and expansion units to scale up efficiently to 5PB.

413PB/Day Produced WW by Video Surveillance Cameras in 2013

How much data is in 413PB?

• It's enough to fill 92.1 million single-sided, single-layer DVDs.
• It's four times the amount of photo and video data stored on Facebook as of February 2012.
• It is also equal to the information produced in just one day by all the new video surveillance cameras installed worldwide in 2013.

The extraordinary deluge of data in the surveillance business is being triggered by a flood of new HD video cameras entering the market.

With shipments of such cameras continuing to rise, the daily data dump is expected to more than double in just four years, expanding to 859PB in 2017. The overwhelming quantity of information will promote the use of technologies that are designed to handle and process big data in the surveillance market, IHS predicts.

HD-compliant products are set to account for an increasing share of video surveillance camera shipments during the next four years, These cameras are gaining acceptance because the quality of their video can be superior to standard-resolution products that formerly dominated the market. But because each HD camera produces far more data than each standard-definition camera, the quantity of data generated by the surveillance market is growing to massive proportions.

Dealing with big data
The surveillance business is adopting several technologies designed to accommodate and mitigate the rising tide of data.

For one, new data compression algorithms should help cut down on the quantity of data. For example, the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard-also known as H.265-has been claimed to double the data compression ratio when compared to H.264, which should reduce the amount of data produced per camera in the coming years.

Another promising development is video content analysis (VCA). VCA can be used to reduce the amount of time a video surveillance camera is recording by using virtual tripwires and no-entry zones. Virtual tripwires and no-entry zones can trigger a camera to record once a predefined event has occurred, such as a person entering a parking lot.

This means than only important events will be recorded by video surveillance cameras, rather than simply recording continuously. As deployments of VCA increase, the technology has the potential to reduce the amount of data produced per camera.

The final area of innovation is in HDDs, where capacities are increasing. While the amount of data produced per camera is expanding, so is capacity to record that data-either on site or via networked systems.