Products, Partners, Performance and Leadership
Nexsan had a strong 2008. We rolled out five groundbreaking new products, led the charge towards next-generation energy-efficient storage solutions that do not compromise application performance, partnered with leaders such as Microsoft, Apple and Symantec, greatly expanded our channel presence and bolstered our leadership team.
We believe that 2008 was the year that green storage went mainstream. It went from a “nice-to-have” feature to a “must-have” feature because Nexsan and other companies developed products that save energy and money without compromising application performance. With high energy costs and overburdened power grids, customers are thrilled to be able to reduce their data storage energy costs by 20-60% simply by purchasing green storage solutions like ours. And while we have a careful eye on the economy, like all businesses, we are confident in our direction and encouraged that IDC, Gartner and Ziff Davis Enterprise are forecasting data storage as one of technology’s 2009 bright spots.
Below, you’ll find more information about 2008 at Nexsan, which can be characterized by products, partners, performance and leadership.
Happy New Year,
Bob Woolery
Senior VP of Marketing
Nexsan Corporation
Products
We significantly expanded our product family in 2008:
– SASBoy is the first green SAS product
– DATABeast is an industry-leading, high-capacity green storage solution that provides Tier 1 features at Tier 2 pricing
– SATABeast Xi is the first high-density, energy-efficient storage platform for the Apple XServe market
– The Edge is a next-generation green NAS appliance
– Assureon 6.0 is the market’s first virtual CAS archive; this product was specifically designed for storage-as-a-service providers delivering them highly scalable, cost-effective archiving. One additional benefit of this virtual CAS archive is its “green maximizer” technology that allows energy savings to be more deeply leveraged.
Partners
We expanded our channel presence with the addition of several new channel partners in 2008, including GE Healthcare, Agfa HealthCare and Jack Henry & Associates. We held our annual NexStep channel partner conferences in the US and Europe, which were very well-attended and a great opportunity to share best practices, product and company information as we gear up for 2009. We also expanded our online Partner Portal, which provides our partners with easy access to sales, marketing and technical resources. Additionally, our products were certified by Microsoft and Symantec and we released joint solutions with Atempo and ONStor.
Performance
For many years, companies of all sizes have been deploying MAID (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks) technology to reduce their data storage energy costs. This “on/off” approach reduces the amount of time — and thereby energy — that is consumed by power-hungry spinning disk drives by putting them to sleep when they are not being accessed. However, early versions of MAID technology, whether you think of them as first-generation MAID, MAID 1.0 or “Old MAID,” sacrifice application performance in a big way, because they do not respond quickly after being put to sleep.
Given today’s economic downturn and high energy costs, the need to cut costs has never been more imperative. So, with necessity being the mother of invention, MAID 2.0 has emerged with Nexsan at the forefront. Put simply, it dramatically broadens the benefits of disk drive energy savings to virtually all associated applications and does so without degrading application performance.
MAID 2.0 solutions like ours achieve this goal by operating at different levels of user-defined energy savings. These user-defined settings allow for increased energy and cost savings the longer the drives are idle — that is, they go from green to greener to greenest. The drives snap back to full speed very quickly upon an I/O request, thus maintaining high levels of performance. MAID 2.0 is the energy-efficient data storage technology with the widest utility. It does not compromise performance, it is easy to implement and it addresses the core cost issue — disk drive energy usage.
Leadership
–Michael McGuire joined us as Chief Commercial Officer; he previously served as VP, Americas Storage Sales at Sun and VP and GM, Sales and Services, U.S. and Canada, at StorageTek
–Dr. Geoff Barrall joined our Board of Directors; he currently serves as the CEO of Data Robotics and previously founded five companies, including BlueArc
