Managed Service Provider Chooses Nexsan for Backup Hardware Platform

Video Case Study: Managing Backups 24/7 with 0% Failure Rate

Avtex is a provider of fully integrated interaction solutions. The company provides a full suite of Managed Services that allows its customers to get the benefit of IT investments without having to be burdened by the day to day management of those environments. Those services include managed backup, reducing the expense and complexity of building and managing an on-premise backup infrastructure.

In building its backup environment, Avtex selected Nexsan for its reliable and cost-effective line of storage products. The service provider did not want to spend much time maintaining a storage environment and Nexsan has proven extremely reliable, significantly reducing drive and system maintenance – the systems work as advertised. With Nexsan, Avtex runs a 24/7 backup services operation with an impressive 0% failure rate. As the company grows, Nexsan’s Flexible Storage Platform allows seamless scalability for untethered growth, alleviating the need for forklift upgrades. The short video case study is profiled at http://bit.ly/rS0USr

· If the delivery of cloud services is an important part an organization’s objectives, it counts on the rapid delivery of scalable best-in-class services, cost containment and risk reduction. Cloud services are built on technologies that meet these objectives. But not all technologies are created equal. And that is why Nexsan's highly efficient storage solutions are built to augment the inherent value created by delivering services through the cloud.

Nexsan's enterprise-class, easy-to-use and efficient storage solutions offer the best value within an organization's storage infrastructure, particularly for medium-sized businesses and mid-tier deployments in large organizations. That is because Nexsan enterprise-class solutions offer a unique combination of cost-effective, high-density, scalable storage built to work hand in glove with software used to create cloud-computing infrastructures. And Nexsan solutions are also peerless when it comes to energy efficiency–in some cases, providing up to 87% better efficiency when compared to competing solutions.

Recommended Nexsan Solutions for Cloud

Nexsan Solutions provide built-in Hyper V management compatibility and are certified with VMware and Citrix, making them ideal for any infrastructure that must accommodate the cloud and virtualization. Nexsan’s Flexible Storage Platform is a high-capacity, high-performance, enterprise-class line of RAID disk storage arrays that deliver tier-1 performance at a fraction of the cost of other competing solutions. Nexsan storage systems provide maximum density for minimal cost, with space and energy efficiencies that cannot be beat.

To learn more or to view this video, visit Nexsan at http://bit.ly/rS0USr

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Managed Service Provider Chooses Nexsan Storage Systems for Backup Hardware Platform - http://bit.ly/rS0USr

@anitaborg_org Rensselaer President and Advisor to Obama Discusses the Importance of Communication in an Interconnected Global Society - http://bit.ly/tXzoHS

Rensselaer President Discusses the Importance of Communication in an Interconnected Global Society to Address World Problems - video

Advisor to President Obama Says Science and Technology Work across Language and Culture

Video - Shirley Ann Jackson, president, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, recently discussed the importance of communication in today's interconnected global world where people of different cultures must work together. Jackson, a theoretical physicist, was chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1990s, and currently serves on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, appointed by President Obama in 2009. She delivered her comments as a keynote speaker at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2011, the world’s largest gathering of women in computing.

Jackson's keynote, titled What if I Lived on the World Stage?, addressed the importance of meeting the challenges and opportunities presented today, with a global perspective: "We are fortunate to live in a time of interconnectedness, where communications and collective action are possible at an international level. We have seen the consequence of this in terms of social and structural change in a number of countries recently. However, in thrusting people of different cultures together daily and rapidly, our smaller world also creates difficulties in achieving true understanding and consideration."

Jackson continued, "Science and technology work across language and culture in a special way. They are global disciplines that reach past nationalities and ethnicities. Thanks to new technologies, we have the opportunity to work in a coordinated way as we face challenges that affect everyone on this planet."

To see the full video, visit http://bit.ly/tXzoHS

The Grace Hopper Celebration is produced by the Anita Borg Institute, which provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in higher levels of technological innovation. Its programs serve high-tech women by creating a community and providing tools to help them develop their careers. The institute is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. Partners include: Google, HP, Microsoft, CA Technologies, Cisco, Facebook, First Republic Bank, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Lockheed Martin, Marvell, National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, NetApp, SAP, Symantec, Thomson Reuters, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Amazon, Broadcom, Motorola Foundation, Raytheon, Salesforce, and Yahoo! For more information, visit www.anitaborg.org.

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Nexsan Storage System Experts Unwrap Guide for Selecting SSD and Hard Disk Drives

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- Nexsan®, a leading independent provider of disk-based storage systems, today announced a new downloadable paper titled “6 Tips for Selecting HDD and SSD Drives.” The free educational resource provides guidance on selecting the most appropriate hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state disk drive (SSD) technology when configuring a storage system for business applications. Access the new paper at http://www.nexsan.com/library/featured.aspx.

There are a number of factors to be considered when selecting drives for a storage environment. These include the level of sequential or random access performance needed, storage density, reliability and cost. With today’s wide variety of storage devices, many IT professionals are challenged with the multitudes of drive technologies. This is especially true when selecting the appropriate drives for various data types. Adding to the confusion is that SATA and SAS refer to disk drive interfaces, whereas SSD refers to a particular kind of internal technology. Selecting a drive technology and interface type can seem complex with considerations of random access performance, sequential performance, cost, density and reliability, but is manageable with the right guidance.

With more than 28,000 storage systems in the field accounting for hundreds of thousands of drives shipped, the storage system experts at Nexsan have significant experience in determining the best and most reliable hard disk and solid state drives for specific applications. According to the company, by observing the following tips on drive selection, confusion over drive choice can be significantly reduced:

1.     Do not confuse disk interface type with performance or reliability. Historically, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) were used as convenient shorthand for fast or dense disk drives, respectively. Now, however, there are SSD drives with SATA interfaces as well as inexpensive and dense but relatively low-IOPS 7200 RPM drives with SAS or even Fibre Channel interfaces.

2.     Achieve the best price/GB with 3.5” 7200 RPM SATA drives. Storage vendors have a seemingly endless variety of pricing models, but one constant seems to be that 2.5” systems cost twice as much per gigabyte as 3.5” systems, assuming both are using “enterprise-grade” drives. But as noted previously, a 3.5” drive will be far more reliable.

3.     Understand that HDD performance is mostly dictated by density and mechanical speed. The random or transactional (IOPS) performance of spinning drives is dominated by the access time, which in turn, is determined by rotational latency and seek time. Interface performance has almost no impact on IOPS. Additionally, interface speed has no measurable impact on sustained performance.

4.     Consider SSD drives instead of 10K or 15K drives for transactional workloads. Today it is very likely that an all-SSD storage solution will have lower overall capital and operational cost than one made from 15,000 RPM drives due to the reduction in total slots required to achieve a given transaction performance. Additionally, SSDs have a greatly reduced power footprint compared to spinning drives for a given number of transactions.

5.     When building systems with high sequential performance for applications such as video, 3TB 7200 RPM SATA drives are better than SSD or 10K/15K drives. Somewhat surprisingly, neither SSDs nor 10,000/15,000 RPM disk drives are better for video and other streaming media applications than 7200 RPM SATA drives, unless there are numerous independent streams being written or read from the same RAID set.

6.     Pay close attention to how much your storage system supplier treats the subject of disk drives. In the spirit of chasing profits, many storage system vendors are moving to a logistics model where drives are not tested in the storage array until it arrives at the customer site. Some no longer perform specific qualification checks between drive hardware and firmware revisions, and the hardware and firmware revisions of all the components of the storage array. This can result in less than stellar outcomes from the start.

“Hardware matters, and organizations intent on maintaining a robust storage environment should not underestimate the importance of optimizing storage infrastructure with quality hardware components and technology that is aligned with the operating environment,” said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group. “While technologies have matured to the point where hard drive downtime does not impact business continuity, missteps in drive selection can wreak havoc on operational performance and result in ongoing maintenance issues. We applaud Nexsan’s focus on educating the market in this often overlooked area.”

“Correct drive choice plays a major role in the overall reliability and performance of a storage system,” said Gary Watson, CTO, Nexsan. “At Nexsan, our processes ensure that only drive models performing well in exhaustive engineering trials and testing are delivered to the customer. Equally important, Nexsan’s partner ecosystem works with end users to match drives to their intended application, ensuring our systems perform optimally in any business environment.”

Download “6 Tips for Selecting HDD and SSD Drives” at http://www.nexsan.com/library/featured.aspx to learn more on this topic.

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About Nexsan 

Nexsan® is a leading independent provider of disk-based storage systems purpose-built and priced for the mid-market, offering industry-leading reliability, space and power efficiency. Nexsan storage systems provide scalability, integrity and security for growing volumes of unstructured data and are ideal for virtual storage, data protection, secure online archiving, bulk and cloud storage applications. Overcoming the challenges of traditional storage, Nexsan delivers a different kind of storage experience with easy-to-use, efficient and enterprise-class solutions that reduce the complexity and cost of storage. Nexsan delivers its storage systems through a select global partner ecosystem of solution providers, OEMs and system integrators. Nexsan is based in Thousand Oaks, Calif. For more information, visit the company’s website at www.nexsan.com.

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For more information about Nexsan’s products and solutions, visit www.nexsan.com

Nexsan is a registered trademark of Nexsan Corporation. All other product or company names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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