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Nexsan Adopts Microsoft Technologies to Enable Storage 3.0 Solutions, Support New Approach to Long-Term Retention and Protection of Information

(March 19, 2008)-- Nexsan announced that it is adopting Microsoft technologies to deliver new secure archive storage solutions that support Storage 3.0, a new concept in long-term information storage that helps companies derive significantly increased value from the data.

The Nexsan Storage 3.0 solution is designed specifically to help corporate customers more efficiently and easily manage the exploding amount of unstructured or fixed data and digital content being created every day. This includes information such as email, presentations, business documents, videos and PACS images, as well as the increased amount of information companies must retain to meet compliance regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Market research firm IDC, which formulated the Storage 3.0 concept, forecasts that the amount of information created and stored by businesses will continue to increase by 55-60 percent per year for the next five years, much of which will be fixed data and created using productivity tools and applications like those of Microsoft. Additionally, IDC expects the storage capacity required to store that information to increase tenfold over that same period. The Storage 3.0 concept calls for a standard, intelligent and policy-based platform that revolutionizes prior notions of storing information based on applications or topics and replaces them with techniques for storing information according to its value.

As part of Microsoft's commitment to deliver a broad range of partner solutions leveraging the Microsoft Windows Platforms and its associated tools, Microsoft will work with Nexsan to expand the Nexsan Assureon family of archive appliances. The Assureon family of archive appliances are the industry's only Microsoft .Net-based secure archiving solutions.

According to IDC, storage systems designed following the Storage 3.0 concepts will typically be built on standard hardware and software platforms that are widely available, supportable and affordable. Storage 3.0 is oriented around an object-centric file system and, most importantly, it features a policy-driven, tiered storage architecture.

"Many of the pieces of Storage 3.0 are already in place in the market," said Benjamin S. Woo, VP, Storage Systems, IDC and lead author of the Storage 3.0 concept. "But, we've been waiting for the integration of the pieces to work as a cohesive system. Solutions like Assureon, on which Microsoft and Nexsan are collaborating, help to connect the dots of the Storage 3.0 vision by tightly integrating an object-oriented file system and policy-driven architecture on a common platform."

Philip Black, Nexsan's President and CEO, said the adoption of Microsoft technologies to build an archiving appliance marks a major milestone for Nexsan that will open significant new Storage 3.0 opportunities for the two companies.

"Being strategically aligned with the Microsoft Windows Platform and development tools accelerates our ability to deliver long-term archiving solutions to larger customer opportunities around the world," said Black. "Just as the platform matters at the desktop and server level, it increasingly matters at the storage level as well. By combining .Net and our secure archive Assureon solutions, we're providing customers with superior price/performance for a green storage system architected for today's business practices."

Nexsan Assureon is a secure, intelligent archive storage solution that combines advanced self-auditing, self-healing technology with content addressable storage (CAS), ILM technology and other patent-pending security, search, protection and energy efficient features into a single, fully integrated, disk-based storage system. Assureon has been designed from the ground up specifically to address the long-term disk storage and management of fixed content and compliance information, making it ideal for organizations that want to improve business practices or must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations.

Nexsan Assureon also employs AutoMAID technology (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks), allowing it to power down disk drives to an idle state to conserve more than 30 times the energy of a conventional fiber channel solution per petabyte of storage, yet still providing nearly instantaneous access to data. These power savings are achieved without sacrificing storage performance and are accomplished in a very small footprint, which further reduces cooling and other energy-related costs within the data center.

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