Imation Unveils NST4000 Hybrid Storage Appliance 

Imation today at VMworld 2014 introduced the NST4000 – a new ultra-efficient hybrid storage appliance purpose-built for media and entertainment and data protection workloads that will deliver Fibre Channel connectivity and new levels of capacity and performance to the mid-range enterprise.

The NST4000 delivers genuine, efficient hybrid storage with tremendous efficiency and processing power using the latest high-performance technologies as well as the flexibility to meet the needs of organizations that continue to rapidly add new applications to their environments. With an intelligent hybrid caching layer, NST4000 is especially well-suited for mid-sized data centers, mixed application workloads, data protection strategies and media and entertainment industry workflows.

Specifically, NST4000 offers significant new user benefits, including:

• Fibre Channel Support – NST4000 expands the Nexsan NST family’s unified block and file sharing capabilities by adding Fibre Channel connectivity for those mid-range enterprises that prefer it for their applications. This gives organizations the ability to take advantage of the benefits of NST’s hybrid storage using a full range of unified storage protocols, including iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, FTP and now Fibre Channel.
• Higher Capacity Scalability – A single NST4000 array can non-disruptively scale to 2.1PB.  This represents 50 percent more storage capacity scale and 45 percent more FASTier cache scale than preceding NST arrays could offer, delivering much more flexibility to IT administrators.
• Increased Performance – The NST4000 can deliver three times as many IOPs as preceding NST storage solutions. This is accomplished by combining optimizations in NestOS 3.1 with Imation’s fault-tolerant FASTier DRAM caching technology, solid-state disks (SSDs) and the latest processor technology.
• Enhanced Data Reduction – The NST4000 delivers faster and smarter inline compression. Compressible data can be processed 50 percent faster, and intelligence removes the penalty of trying to act upon noncompressible data.

“It’s hard to properly allocate storage capacity to support existing needs and plan for future data growth, because new applications with varying workloads are being introduced and integrated all the time,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing and technical support for Imation’s Nexsan solutions. “It’s also hard to ensure there’s enough storage performance to support application and user demands – and even harder to build an infrastructure that delivers the right balance of capacity, performance, efficiency and ROI for the organization given all of these variables. The new NST4000 combines our experience designing the best in high-capacity, high-reliability storage with our proprietary, self-tuning hybrid cache system to create the ultimate solution for efficient mid-range storage.”

"The new NST4000 is an Imation proof point that they are executing their strategy around its Nexsan product portfolio, including bringing new storage value and productivity to the market," said Greg Schulz, principal at StorageIO. "Their NST4000 is a hybrid mid-range storage solution including software defined storage management that provides scalability of performance and capacity, along with the reliability associated with the Imation brand. Being a hybrid also means the NST4000 has the flexibility to connect to your applications using multi-protocol block (SAN) or file (NAS) as well as support SSD caching and various types of disk drives. It's time to ask not what you can do for your storage system, rather what can your hybrid storage system do for you and your applications."

“We and our customers have had great success with Nexsan NST hybrid storage appliances from Imation, so we’re really looking forward to integrating the new Nexsan NST4000 into our offerings,” said Mark Tuggle of USI Corporation. “Nexsan NST solutions are fast, flexible, dense, scalable and value-packed – all at a very reasonable price point.”

Imation’s Nexsan NST is a set of flexible hybrid storage appliances that scale to meet mid-sized organization application and storage needs with unified NAS and SAN access capabilities in a single solution. NST combines high performance, high capacity and Imation’s innovative FASTier caching technology to provide scaling performance for backup, virtualized environments and mixed application workloads. FASTier is NST’s hybrid caching layer that combines intelligent algorithms with high-performance DRAM and SSD technologies to grow performance cost-effectively when it is required. NST enables businesses to right size their initial acquisition and increase performance as their applications demand it. Also, NST’s data compression capabilities reduce storage system footprint in the data center and improve write efficiencies and performance to SSDs and HDDs.

The NST family is just one part of Imation’s deep Nexsan portfolio of purpose-built storage solutions, enabling users to deploy the right storage products for the right application. The other Nexsan product lines are:

• Imation’s Nexsan E-Series is a family of high-density, high-performance and highly reliable storage solutions that can be directly attached or networked to workstations and servers. E-Series delivers the density and efficiency that mid-sized organizations need to scale their capacity while lowering their overall space requirements and operating costs. All E-Series systems take the extra step to reduce power and cooling requirements through their multi-level, power-reducing AutoMAID capabilities. They also include an easy-to-use management interface that simplifies deployment and management for the resource-constrained IT administrator.

• Imation’s Nexsan Assureon is a set of secure storage solutions that reduce storage cost by offloading and deduplicating data from primary storage that is infrequently used or has aged by policy. Assureon, through policy automation, can eliminate or greatly reduce the size, cost and complexity of backups for primary and infrequently accessed data. Assureon includes multi-tenancy – with secure copy creation, data movement and long term storage – and chargeback capabilities for public and private cloud deployments. Data integrity features like file-fingerprinting and automated self-healing integrity checks ensure that your high-value data is protected. Assureon’s security features comply with corporate and governmental regulatory requirements and make it well suited for medical, financial and government organizations.