Nexsan NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster is Meeting Rising Worldwide Need for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Imation (NYSE:IMN), a global data storage and information security company, is reporting strong interest in its Nexsan™ NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster system among customers worldwide, driven by imperatives to maintain continuous availability for mission-critical applications, create agile IT infrastructures, and, at the same time, reduce overall costs. Part of Imation’s next-generation Nexsan NST6000 Unified Hybrid Storage portfolio, the NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster is ideal for IT staff seeking to reduce system complexity, simplify management and earn greater ROI by improving mission-critical application availability while easily scaling performance and storage capacity.

“Since we launched our stretched cluster solution in August, we’ve seen increasing demand from customers who place a premium on avoiding downtime and having synchronous mirrored storage at two sites. Our customers are focused on business continuity solutions that are easy to manage, maintain, install and scale,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing and technical support for Imation’s Nexsan solutions.

For example, a leading security manufacturer is deploying multiple NST6000MC Metro Storage Clusters to support security operations at several airports, an application that requires high storage scalability and 24/7 uptime. In addition, customers in industries as diverse as finance, healthcare, utilities and manufacturing are showing high interest in the NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster to ensure uptime for databases, virtualized servers and business applications.

The NST6000MC Metro Storage Cluster is a compact, scalable, integrated solution for high availability and disaster recovery that extends data replication and failover capability from within a data center to a campus site or to a metro site located up to 10km away. As part of the NST6000 Unified Hybrid Storage platform, the NST60000MC supports both SAN and NAS protocols, while leveraging solid-state storage to accelerate read performance of the underlying spinning disk drives housed in efficient Fibre Channel-connected Nexsan E-Series™ storage arrays. The net result is a lower cost-per-I/O and lower total cost of ownership.

Additional features include:

• High Availability Failover: Active/Active controllers provide high availability failover from one NST6000MC node to another.
• Synchronous Mirroring: Delivers continuous, up-to-date copies of data to different sites.
• Client Support: Supports Linux, OS X, UNIX, Windows, vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer clients.
• Storage Services: Supports CIFS, SMBv1, NFSv3, NFSv4, iSCSI target and FTP protocols.
• Nexsan FASTier™ Caching: Uses flexible, scalable FASTier™ read caching to accelerate read operations.
• Scalable: Up to 5 petabytes (PB) of E-Series ultra-reliable, energy-efficient, high performance, Fibre Channel RAID storage expansion.

Next Generation Unified Hybrid Storage

Imation’s NST6000 Unified Hybrid Storage platform is being demonstrated this week at VMworld Barcelona at Stand B411. The NST6000 platform is designed to meet a range of I/O requirements in a single system, providing support for block (Fibre Channel or iSCSI) or file-based (NFS, CIFS, SMB and FTP) traffic without sacrificing performance or requiring additional software or licenses. As a result, the NST6000 system efficiently and simultaneously supports high capacity I/O intensive workloads generated in virtualized environments.

Intelligent FASTier caching built into the NST6000 controller uses a combination of DRAM and flash-based SSD storage to deliver lower latency, accelerate performance of the underlying spinning disks and reduce the wear issues of flash.

In addition, the NST6000 enables users to scale up write and read cache capacities by expanding both internal DRAM and SSD capacity. Storage managers can dictate how solid-state memory is used across applications by customizing FASTier read caches for specific volumes in the underlying spinning disk storage.

IT managers can take advantage of a wide range of back-end storage options to scale the NST6000 storage system for both capacity and performance. The NST6000 system connects with Nexsan E-Series arrays and expansion units to scale up efficiently to 5 PB.

For more information on Imation’s Nexsan storage solutions, visit www.imation.com/nexsan.

About Imation

Imation (NYSE: IMN) is a global data storage and information security company. Our products and solutions help organizations and individuals store, manage and protect their digital content. Imation’s storage and security portfolio includes Nexsan high-density, archive and solid-state optimized unified hybrid storage solutions; IronKey mobile security solutions that address the needs of professionals for secure data transport and mobile workspaces; and consumer storage solutions, audio products and accessories sold under the Imation, Memorex and TDK Life on Record brands. Imation reaches customers in more than 100 countries through a powerful global distribution network. For more information, visit www.imation.com.

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Imation, the Imation logo, Nexsan, the Nexsan by Imation logo, NST, FASTier and Memorex are trademarks of Imation Corp. TDK Life on Record is a trademark of TDK Corporation and is used under license. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.