By Kevin Komiega
January 22, 2009 -- Nexsan Technologies has once again combined its energy-saving AutoMAID (massive array of idle disks) technology with high-performance, SAS-based RAID storage to create the new SASBeast disk array.
The SASBeast, which is set to be released next week and is the company’s second offering in the SAS market, features up to 42 disk drives in a 4U enclosure for a total of 18.9TB of SAS capacity. The SASBeast also supports SATA drives, as well as 4Gbps Fibre Channel and 1Gbps iSCSI connectivity.
Each SASBeast array features four RAID engines and up to 4GB of cache per dual- controller configuration. The array supports multiple RAID sets and multiple volumes per set, and as many as 256 LUNs per controller. The SASBeast also supports hardware-based RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 4, 5 and 6.
Like its smaller counterpart, the 4.2TB SASBoy RAID array, AutoMAID technology is a standard feature on the SASBeast platform. AutoMAID gives users the option of choosing among three different levels of energy savings, ranging from 20% power savings with response times of less than 10 seconds to 60% energy savings with a 30-second response time.
Bob Woolery, Nexsan’s senior vice president of marketing, says even high-speed systems can be designed to save power. “You don’t have to give up energy efficiency for performance anymore. Systems are not always working 24hours a day,”
With the SASBeast, Nexsan also introduced a new horizontal mid-plane design that promotes more efficient airflow, which helps the system run significantly cooler to improve energy savings, according to Woolery.
Nexsan plays in the tier 2 storage market where retaining and protecting unstructured data is the top concern. Woolery says the SASBeast meets the storage needs of transactional applications with high IOPS requirements and the ability to scale to hundreds of terabytes of capacity in a single rack.
Pricing for a SAS-only system starts at $38,000. The SASBeast costs approximately $4,200/TB of SAS capacity.
The SASBeast is available in a variety of configurations, including a full SAS system that can be populated with up to 42 drives. Intermixed drive configurations are available with up to 14 SAS drives and 28 SATA drives, or up to 28 SAS drives and 14 SATA drives.
Related articles:
Nexsan ships AutoMAID disk array
Nexsan enables archiving-as-a-service
Nexsan targets Apple Xserve market
