I had the opportunity to talk with Nexsan’s Andy Hill (VP Sales) recently to look at the company’s introduction of its Unity NV6000 as well as its success, strategy and values.
Nexsan’s CEO Dan Shimmerman said the company is focusing on mid-market customers looking for on-premises data storage rather than cloud or cloud-like operational models.
Nexsan has been owned by Serene Investment Management LLC since its acquisition of StorCentric in February 2023. Founded in 1999, it was the first storage system vendor to use ATA drives in data center arrays and was early to introduce AutoMAID to power down the drives that weren’t in use, making its solutions less energy-hungry and more economically sustainable. It claims to have 40,000 enterprise customers.
Its products are:
- Unity – currently NV6000 and NV10000 – arrays support advanced block (iSCSCI, FC), file (NFS, SMB) and (S3) object blocking within one platform. Security, compliance and ransomware protection is provided through the its immutable volume and file system snapshot features.
- BEAST – currently P (all HDD), Elite F (all flash) and Elite (mixed) is high-performance block (FC, iSCSI) supporting SAS and SSD drives with maximum capacities of 1.32PB in 4U and 3.96PB in 12U standard rack-mount units, with AES-256 encryption built-in for protecting data at rest.
- E Series P – currently E18 P, E48 P and E60P – high-density SAN or DAS block storage with maximum capacities of 49TB (2U), 1.32PB (4U) in rack-mountable products adding up to a total maximum capacity of 13.6PB in a single rack.
- Assureon – is an immutable storage product for data protection, regulatory compliance (including HIPAA, GLBA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), SEC 17A-4 and PCI DSS), streamlined operations and resilient defense against cyber threats. It can be connected on-premise or via a public cloud.
It sells entirely through distribution partners, of which it had over 750 in 100 countries in 2019. Unlike many other storage system suppliers Nexsan currently does not offer its own subscription or leasing services.
It’s great to discover an important hardware supplier which, although small, continues to produce cost-effective products and solutions. It is doing well by emphasizing the advantages its products have in protecting them from ransomware attacks. As an independent supplier, now separated from the putative StorCentric conglomerate, it could benefit from refocusing its technical partnerships (especially with SDS players) to make sure its products and solutions appear in a wider set of proposals.