I first came across this thing a few MacWorld’s ago. It was impressive then in terms of how densely packed the chassis was with drives and that the form factor was something so similar to the Apple form factor I was worried about potential legal action. But no legal action came and they’re still doing their thing. The SATABeast, from Nexsan is as impressive in raw disk space girthyness as it is diminutive in comparable size. 42TB in a 4U chassis. That’s 10.5TB per unit of rackspace. The AutoMAID software allows you to cut down BTU and power requirements by spinning down drives that aren’t in use. This isn’t to say that you’d want to in a scenario where all the drives need to be ready to read and write data all the time, as in Xsan, but then the unit hasn’t been certified for Xsan support, so that more than likely won’t be a factor. Clearly I’ll be looking for an announcement from them at the upcoming MacWorld and stopping by their booth, if only to listen to all those drive pays spinning harmoniously in unison. Due to latency issues I’m not a huge proponent of putting raw online Xsan storage on one of these, but they do make really good (especially for their price point) archival storage and near-line storage.
Nexsan also has a product called the Edge that I hope to get a glimpse of soon, which offers iSCSI storage up to 84TB. Since I’m pretty keen on using iSCSI and Fibre Channel for housing VMs these days this might just prove to have the density for file servers while also having the price point that can allow for full-on consolidation of various systems. I look forward to seeing what these guys turn out next. While they don’t have the blessing that Apple has given Promise, Nexsan’s products do require a second look nonetheless.