Datapipe Selects Nexsan NST5000

Nexsan Corporation
announced that the NST5000 unified storage system has been selected by Datapipe, Inc, a provider
of mission-critical IT services, for use in its cloud-based storage
initiative.

Part of the Nexsan Flexible Storage Platform of products, the NST5000 is suited
for cloud-based environments that require enterprise-class features and the
performance delivered by Nexsan FASTier acceleration technology.

As an IT services provider for customers in a
range of vertical industries, including pharmaceutical, financial services,
healthcare and retails, Datapipe has an active initiative for managed storage
in the cloud. Designed to safeguard data against hardware failure and human
error, the cloud-based managed storage solution from Datapipe is a data
protection backbone for a large range of mid-sized enterprises. The company required high performance, reliability and the
flexibility to support random I/O workloads.

To help in its selection, Datapipe turned to its VAR RADirect, Inc.

"Datapipe is a solution provider that prides itself on selecting quality
solutions to support the needs of its customers," said Stephanie
VanDerHeide, senior account manager for RADirect. "They put every solution through a rigorous proof-of-concept evaluation
before making a selection to ensure that it met their requirements for
performance, functionality and capacity. Datapipe selected the Nexsan NST5000,
which exceeded expectations and has proven to be the ideal choice for their
cloud infrastructure."

NST unified storage systems feature FASTier acceleration technology
to optimize caching and tiering by utilizing DRAM and
flash-based solid state memory. Along with spinning media, FASTier triples
real-world random I/O performance to enable performing IT environments. The new
NST systems combine FASTier’s software with up to 24 Xeon CPU
cores, 192GB of DRAM, 12 dedicated RAID engines, and up to 1PB of storage
capacity. FASTier can scale from 100GB to 2.8TB, allowing an NST system to hold
entire working sets, further amplifying performance with high IOPS and reduced
latency without complication, or the need to utilize a separate management
paradigm. With NST storage systems, SATA drives can be used to deliver
performance which was only attainable with 15K SAS drives previously, and 15K
SAS drives can be used to deliver performance in
virtualized infrastructures, databases, email servers, or in cloud deployments.

In practice, Datapipe has found the NST5000 to be suited for its
cloud storage environment. Especially attractive is the ability to use high
capacity 3TB SATA drives in the solution to get a combination of ultra-high
capacity with three times the performance. Also a significant factor supporting
Datapipe’s selection was FASTier acceleration technology. It
works transparently to boost performance for random I/O workload demands.

"FASTier is the ‘secret
sauce’ that sets the NST5000 apart from other storage solutions we tested,"
said Sanford "Sam" Coker, director of Storage Administration,
Datapipe Managed IT Services. "The
technology changes the game for Nexsan and provides benefits that are of
significant value to us and our customers."

Datapipe is a longtime Nexsan customer, also storing more than 1.3PB
of data on Nexsan E60 and SATABeast storage systems in their datacenter for
backup and recovery applications. But for the range of unstructured file
data stored in their cloud environment, the NST5000 proved to be the
option because it features:

• FASTier acceleration technology, which triples random I/O
  performance of the underlying SATA drives High capacity storage in a dense form
  factor to maximize datacenter floor space
• Nexsan Flexible Scalability with the ability to scale performance
  and capacity independently
• Enterprise-class reliability and fault tolerance.

"When it comes to the
dynamic data storage requirements of high-demand cloud-based environments,
having a high performance storage solution that can support dramatic flexibility
in I/O workloads is critical," said Victoria Grey, SVP, Marketing, Nexsan. "That
is where Nexsan’s innovative FASTier technology shines. It delivers the
performance required without sacrificing capacity for data intensive cloud-based
infrastructures."