Nexsan Upgrades Assureon

By Greg McNevin

October 8, 2008: Nexsan has upgraded its Assureon disk-based archiving solution, pitching version 6.0 as a “green” storage platform for offering external archiving-as-a-service solutions.

The company says that Assureon 6.0 is the industry’s first green archive-as-a-service solution due to its ability to be partitioned into an unlimited number of secure archives, as well as make better use of capacity by removing the object count limitations that it says have plagued previous content addressable storage (CAS) archives.

Older archives are limited by the total number of files/objects that can be stored, and according to Nexsan, in many cases customers have significant amounts of storage space left over once they have reached their maximum object count.

Assureon 6.0 scales to support multiple virtual file systems, with each being an independent, private and secure CAS archive within one larger consolidated or federated archive. Nexsan says that this provides physical separation of customer data while circumventing the need to add large, expensive databases to increase storage and object limits.

The solution is being pitched at managed service providers as it enables them to store data for several hundred subscription-based customers on a single remote server while ensuring data privacy.

As for it being “green”, the solution does enable better use of existing capacity, thereby lowering power consumption in the longer term. While this may not sound earth shattering, with datacentres consuming vast quantities of power these days further innovations in energy efficiency are always welcome.

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