Nexsan E-Series Storage Systems Faster With New Firmware

Nexsan Corporation announced a new firmware for its storage product line, the E-Series high density storage system.

This latest upgrade substantially increases the performance of all models of the Nexsan E-Series, from the E18 to the E48 and E60’s. Internal testing demonstrates an increase with the new firmware from 40% to over 50% on sequential write performance. The release also includes other enhancements, including intelligent failback of replication, VMware VAAI support, and management enhancements.

"Nexsan continues to extend its price/performance advantage with this latest release," said Joe Thompson, VP of channels at Abacus Solutions, LLC., a Nexsan partner. "The E-Series is already an enterprise-class storage solution that provides outstanding value. With these latest enhancements, Nexsan is adding tremendous benefit for existing users while also expanding the market potential for the E-Series with new applications for the technology. That’s a real win-win for us as a partner."

The write performance improvements in the release complement the E-Series’ read performance for dense storage. It also makes it a solution for high data throughput applications with dynamic data, as seen in large enterprise backup, and media and entertainment environments with large video ingestion.

Snapshot and replication for the E-Series has also been enhanced to provide intelligent failback from the replica in recovery scenarios. E-Series Replication now keeps track of all the deltas on the target side in the event of failure, for faster and easier transition back to the primary when available.

It adds to E-Series’ existing enterprise features, such as:

• Support for both one-to-one and many-to-one replication
• Replication based on snapshots
• Snapshots that can be mounted on the destination side while replication is active
• Checkpoint restart

Nexsan also builds on its partnership with VMware by adding support for VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI). This enables tighter storage integration in vSphere environments to achieve efficiencies and scalability. Storage operations are offloaded to the E-Series for enhanced VM performance.

Additional enterprise features new in this release include easier integration and management of the E-Series in complex IT environments, with SNMP support for large petabyte-scale deployments, and a management agent that can be deployed as a VM or as a stand-alone appliance. Other enhancements include improvements to disk-health monitoring, increased flexibility in maintaining log data and improved alert functionality.

"E-Series is the core of Nexsan’s product line, delivering dense SAN storage as well as capacity for our NST unified hybrid storage products," said Thomas F. Gosnell, head of research and development for the company, and CEO of Nexsan Canada. "This latest release builds on our strong track record for quality, reliability and value, and raises the bar substantially for our competition."

Nexsan’s new firmware with VAAI certification will ship on all new E-Series systems starting in Q4 2012. All installed systems are compatible with the upgrade and all customers with a maintenance agreement will receive it under their contract.