Nexsan adds storage virtualisation to Maid

Storage company Nexsan on Tuesday debuted a new version of its archiving system, Assureon 6.0, which builds in scalability and security features, such as the ability to separate archiving between users.

The updated Assureon software includes Nexsan's AutoMaid green technology, which is intended to reduce power consumption in a hosted datacentre. The Assureon system itself consists of disk storage, archiving software and servers in a single rack.

Nexsan uses its own method of storing data, called Maid (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks), which exploits the fact most disk arrays can be almost constantly rotating and therefore using energy. Maid uses smaller disks, but more of them, so that at any one time most of the disks are idle. According to Nexsan, the method reduces energy consumption overall.

"Companies of all sizes are under great pressure today to save money, save energy and operate more efficiently, and increasingly they are doing so by turning to new, outsourced subscription models for everything from their software to their storage applications," Gregg Pugmire, executive vice president of business development at Nexsan, said in a statement. Such features are useful for SaaS (software as a service) applications, he said.

Nexsan said Assureon 6.0 also features an innovative content-addressable storage (CAS) capability, which allows customers to virtualise a system into "an essentially unlimited number of physically secure archives".

The Assureon system competes with iSCSI storage area network packages from companies such as EqualLogic PS 5000 and LeftHand Networks. Nexsan has not yet provided a price for Assureon 6.0.